678 



Canadian Forestry Journal, August, igi6 



Causes of Forest Fires. — The only fires and should be required to more 

 natural causes of forest fires are rigidly conform to the law requiring 

 friction and lightning, both of which them to use spark arresters and to 

 occasionally start fires in dead trees, keep their right-of-way free from 

 but as such fires are most likely to combustible material. 

 be set during a rain they seldom do The moral effect of a properly 

 much damage. Practically all the enforced forest fire law is not only 

 injurious forest fires that have de- very great in restraining the care- 

 vastated the forested part of this less, but especially in educating law- 

 section have resulted indirectly abiding citizens in the idea that 

 either from a lack of appreciation of there is value in young seedlings 



the damage done by them or from 

 carelessness and ignorance. In the 

 disastrous Hinckley fire of 1894 the 

 damage was done by a large fire 

 formed by the combination of sev- 

 eral small fires that were allowed to 

 smoulder in the swamps 



near 



and timber trees. 



The prevention of forest fires will 

 be most certainly accomplished by 

 educating our people to an appre- 

 ciation of the amount of damage 

 done by them.. In some counties in 

 this state it is impossible to enforce 

 Hinckley for a week or more,_ which the law against setting forest fires 

 when fanned by a dry hot wind at- owing to the belief that fires are a 

 tained an irresistible energy. If we good thing for their sections in de- 

 had had a fire law that could have stroying tree growth and bringing 

 been properly enforced at that time, the land into condition to be easily 

 or if the people near Hinckley had taken up by settlers. There is some 

 been aware of their danger, that truth in this claim, but since the 

 great fire, with its attendant great fires destroy all increase on the land 

 loss of life and property, need not they sweep over, a large amount of 

 have occurred. it is thereby rendered entirely un- 



Fires often escape from settlers productive long before the settlers 

 when they are clearing land and are are ready for it, while in the mean- 

 sometimes started by them to make time it might be producing a crop 

 pasture for their stock. The care- of valuable timber. Then again, it 

 less use of fire by the hunters, pros- is the greatest injustice to allow one 

 pectors and others who camp in the person to burn the property of an- 

 forest and leave their camp fires un- other, which right is practically 

 extinguished is another common claimed by those who advocate the 

 cause of fires. Railroads set many unrestricted use of fire." 



Huge Timbers for New Fleet 



Responding to invitations extend- 

 ed by the oft"icials of the British Co- 

 lumbia Mills, Timber and Trading 

 Company, Limited, many Vancou- 

 ver citizens paid a visit recently to 

 Hastings Mills — a landmark on 

 Burrard Inlet for over half a century 

 — to inspect some unusually large 

 timbers which had been cut to order. 

 Three of the huge sticks of Douglas 

 fir measured from 110 to 116 feet 

 in length and 20x20 inches in girth, 

 and were manufactured to the order 



of the Wallace Shipyards, Limited, 

 North Vancouver, to form the keels 

 of the first of the fleet of wooden 

 schooners to be constructed under 

 the new Shipping Act of the Brit- 

 ish Columbia Government. An- 

 other massive timber, 100 feet in 

 length and 28 inches in diameter, 

 was being fashioned by ship car- 

 penters into a mainmast for the 

 brigfantine Amv Turner, of Vancou- 

 ver, and was pronounced one of the 

 finest sticks ever brought into Van- 



