PREFACE. 



The third edition of Volume I. of my " Manual of Forestry " 

 contained an exposition of the General Foundations of Forest 

 Policy, and a short account of the state of forest conservancy in 

 the greater part of the British Empire. That account was, I 

 believe, the first attempt of the kind, but it was incomplete owing 

 to the difficulty of obtaining reliable information on many points. 

 In July, 1920, the Imperial Forest Conference received thirty-four 

 Statements from the different parts of the Empire containing a 

 flood of new information, of which I have made full use in this 

 fourth edition. The original statements cover 517 foolscap pages 

 of close print, of which my friend, Mr. R. L. Robinson, the 

 Technical Forestry Commissioner, has prepared an excellent 

 summary and attached it to the Proceedings of the Empire Forest 

 Conference. In this volume I have taken a middle course by 

 recording all essential facts given in the Statements and omitting 

 matter of less importance to the general reader. I have added, 

 as regards each country, my personal views on the steps to be 

 taken in the immediate future. 



I hope that I have succeeded in giving a readable account of 

 the condition of forest conservancy in the Empire as it stood in 

 July, 1920. At any rate, the contents of the book may serve as a 

 basis by which future progress may be judged. 



I had intended to illustrate the book fully, but I had to abandon 

 that project owing to the high cost of production at the present 

 time. Nor have I added the conventional Index, which, in a book 

 of this kind, would have been of doubtful utility. On the other 

 hand, I have given a detailed Table of Contents, which should 

 enable the reader to find without difficulty the desired subject. 



It should be mentioned that, in the case of those parts of the 



