86 FOREST REGULATION 



b. Hold waste lands ; on some of these an effort at reforesta- 

 tion has been made. 



c. Small patches of ground along" their right of way and about 

 stations. On these patches the effort is to beautify, to please the 

 traveling public. 



During the last ten years a few of these companies have begun 

 to realize the danger of a shortage in railway ties, and are preparing 

 to meet this by going into forestry, buying suitable lands to provide 

 stumpage and by proper care, raise new supplies. Here is a field 

 for the most intensive form of forestry, but as yet the object itself 

 is still under debate, so that a real Plan in most cases does not yet 

 exist. 



6. State Forests. These vary from virgin forest such as parts 

 of the Adirondack holdings, through all gradations of culled and 

 cut over woods to the most desolate cut and burned-over sand plains 

 of the Lake Region. Since the whole subject of state forestry has 

 not yet begun to be a real business enterprise, but is still matter of 

 debate, with practically no recognition in the legislatures of the 

 several states involved, there is neither policy nor appropriation, in 

 fact not even good will, and the object of holding these forests is, 

 therefore, an uncertain one, and can only be inferred from the 

 efforts of those interested in the work itself and from the little work 

 actually done. 



The small holdings in the New England States were set aside 

 or acquired for the sake of saving the beauty or scenery, protect 

 streams, and help as object lessons to the people. 



The state forests of New York ostensibly were for scenery and 

 water preservation ; in fact they would never have been bought and 

 certainly never have been held, had it not been for the wealthy 

 owners of summer homes in the mountains. The object here does 

 not consider the forest a crop, nothing is cut, millions of feet an- 

 nually, green and dead stuff, are allowed to go to waste. The work 

 so far consists in a half-hearted protection and show place planting, 

 there is no forestry, no lumbering, merely a holding of i l /2 million 

 acres of wild woods in a state of Nature. Forestry here is still 

 forbidden by law. 



Pennsylvania owns nearly a million acres of largely devastated 

 mountain woods or lands and is buving more ; she educates her 



