14 THE USE BOOK. 



use of lumber per capita by a still more rapidly in- 

 creasing population; the decrease in the summer flow 

 of streams just as they become indispensable to manu- 

 facture or irrigation; and the serious decrease in the 

 carrying capacity of the summer range. It can not be 

 doubted that, as President Roosevelt has said, "the 

 forest problem is in many ways the most vital internal 

 problem of the United States." 



As early as 1799 Congress provided for the purchase 

 of timberlands to suppl} r the needs of the Navy, and 

 in 1817 further legislation directed the setting apart of 

 public lands for the same purpose, and provided penal- 

 ties for the unauthorized cutting of any public timber. 

 Other acts, from time to time, made similar provisions 

 for setting apart forest land for specific purposes, but 

 the first attempt to secure a comprehensive adminis- 

 tration of the forests on the public domain was in 1871, 

 by a bill introduced in the Forty-second Congress, 

 which failed of passage. 



In 1876, $2,000 was appropriated to employ a com- 

 petent man to investigate timber conditions in the 

 United States, and on June 30, 1886, an act was ap- 

 proved creating a Division of Forestry in the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture. On July 1, 1901, this Division 

 became the Bureau of Forestry (now the Forest Serv- 

 ice, since the act of March 3, 1905), employing prac- 

 tically all the trained foresters in the United States, 

 and engaged in almost every branch of forest work in 

 every State and Territory except the actual adminis- 

 tration of the Government forest lands. This remained 

 in the Department of the Interior, which, although pos- 

 sessing complete machinery for the disposal of lands, 



