110 OF WOOD IN GENERAL. 



Whilst all woodland has disappeared from some lands, special 

 species are threatened with extinction in others. The pine 

 forests of Tunis have disappeared during the last hundred years : 

 some districts of Australia already experience a scarcity of fire- 

 wood and of mine-props : until Government regulations put a stop 

 to the felling of saplings to act as rollers in transporting the 

 larger logs, the valuable Greenheart of Demerara was in imminent 

 danger of extinction ; and the enormous drain upon the supply 

 of White Pine (Finns Strubus) is a grave danger in North 

 America. 



Great Britain. In Great Britain the abundance of coal 

 renders us independent of wood as fuel, and our geographical 

 position so facilitates the importation of timber that we have to 

 a great extent neglected our woodlands as a source of profit, 

 while our mild insular climate has enabled us to overlook the 

 hygienic importance of forests. There is accordingly little more 

 than 2J million acres of woods and forests in the United King- 

 dom, or only 3*8 per cent, of the entire area, a lower percentage 

 than that of any other European state, while this country stands 

 pre-eminent as the greatest importer of timber, exceeding 300 

 million cubic feet, or, including paper-pulp, gums, bark, and 

 other forest produce, an annual value exceeding 35 millions 

 sterling. No complete statistics are available as to our con- 

 sumption of home-grown timber. Special local demand is to 

 some extent met by local supply, as, for instance, in the case of 

 the bobbin-wood in the cotton-mill districts, pit-props in the 

 Scottish mining area, and the Beech of the Chilterns, from 12,000 

 to 15,000 loads of which are used annually in the Buckingham- 

 shire chair-making industry, by which some 50,000 families are 

 supported. Of our imports, nearly five millions sterling is the 

 value of the timber received from Canada. 



Sir J. F. L. Kolleston, M.P., in his presidential address to the 

 Surveyors' Institution in November, 1901, said : 



"Before leaving the subject of land and its future, I should like to say 

 that of all its products the only one, the value of which appears to be in 

 the ascending scale, is timber. In the midland counties I have been 



