336 ECONOMICS OF FORESTRY. 



ing. We can only attempt rough approximations, 

 applying to the data at hand personal knowledge 

 and impressions gathered in the field with pro- 

 fessional insight. We can readily admit that 

 these figures are often far from correct, yet not 

 so far but that they give a true conception of the 

 general condition of things. 



Applying proper economic considerations, we 

 may at once halve the figures given for both the 

 Rocky Mountain and the Pacific forest, and re- 

 duce that of the Atlantic forest, after deducting 

 the actually enumerated farm area by only lo 

 per cent, a small allowance to make for actual 

 waste lands. ^ We thus arrive at an area of round 

 500 million acres as representing the real forest 

 resources of the country, a near enough ap- 



1 Some basis for such reductions may be found in information of 

 the following kind: — 



The nearest approach to a statistical statement for one of the 

 Pacific Coast states, Washington, is made in the Twentieth Report 

 of the U. S. Geol. Survey, 1900, Part V, from which it appears, that 

 while the area reported as forest by the chief geographer is 47,700 

 square miles, only half that acreage is found to contain merchant- 

 able timber, of which two-thirds is located in the western one-third 

 of the state. Here, of 15,858 square miles, formerly covered with 

 merchantable timber, 20 per cent are reported cut and nearly 23 

 per cent destroyed by fire. 



For the state of Oregon the same report upon rather insufficient 

 data reduces the reported woodland area of 54,300 square miles to 

 45,441 of timbered, i.e. economically valuable area. 



A similar survey of one of the Atlantic forest states, Wisconsin, 

 described in Bulletin 15, Forestry Division, U. S. Dept. of Agricul- 

 ture, 1S98, reduces the woodland, reported by the census of 1880, 



