358 ECONOMICS OF FORESTRY. 



government surveys and railroad-land cruisings, and 

 the examinations of the federal forest reservations 

 by agents of the United States Geological Survey. 

 These forests are all coniferous, the broad-leaved 

 trees playing an insignificant part, although the 

 Pacific Coast forests contain some valuable oak, 

 ash, and maple. The Western forests are mainly 

 confined to the mountain slopes, varying in char- 

 acter with latitude and altitude, i.e. with the varia- 

 tion in moisture and temperature conditions. We 

 have seen that probably 50 per cent of the wood- 

 land area may be ruled out from consideration 

 as timber producing, so that roughly only round 

 100,000,000 acres remain for that purpose, one- 

 half on the Rocky Mountains, the other half on 

 the Pacific coast. If this were all untouched, we 

 might have found for the Rocky Mountain forest 

 a stand of not exceeding 200,000 million and for 

 the Pacific coast forest 1,000,000 million feet, 

 but from these stores during our occupation of 

 these territories at least 200,000,000 people have 

 drawn their annual requirement of probably not 

 less than 500 feet, and that in a wasteful manner ; 

 a large amount of material has been exported to 

 neighboring states and across the sea, and a still 

 larger amount has been destroyed by fire, so that, 

 gathering indications from the reports of the Geo- 

 logical Survey, the amount of standing timber, ac- 

 cording to present standards and under present 

 methods of utilization, will probably be less than 



