(53 ) 
CAPE NATIONAL FORESTS. 
By D. E. Hutcuins. 
(Read August 31, 1898.) 
We are now importing yearly 5,000,000 cubic feet of timber, 
mostly pine (average of last two years, 4°93). This comes from four 
sources: Germany and Russia, Sweden, and America. Of these 
sources of supply, it is only in Germany that the forests are being 
scientifically conserved and worked with a regard to the future. 
The present value of the German forests, capitalised at 2 per 
cent. (which is a fair, all-round estimate, though some of them 
yield as much as 5 per cent.), amounts to the enormous sum of 
£100,000,000 sterling! The prices obtained for wood in Germany 
have more than doubled during the last half-century. These are 
average prices. In some localities the competition of coal and 
iron has reduced the value of wood. 
In Russia, an impecunious Government has leased large areas of 
forests to factories and mill-owners, who are destroying it so rapidly 
that the climate is becoming impaired. The Russian famine of four 
years ago was caused by drought, attributed by local scientific 
authorities to the rapid destruction of the forests. 
In Sweden most of the forest is in the hands of private owners. 
It is steadily going the way of all such forest. Much of the wood 
that reaches the Colony from Sweden is, within my observation, 
young and immature. Witness the wooden sleepers imported by 
Government a few years ago. 
The forests of America are in process of rapid destruction. The 
period at which the destruction will be so far advanced as to stop 
exportation has been variously estimated at from twenty to fifty 
years. To some extent this point will depend on the growth of the 
sentiment in favour of scientific conservation, the first effect of 
which will be a diminution of supplies. There is a strong and 
rapidly growing feeling in America in favour of national forests. 
Large areas of forest lands have been quite lately set aside for this 
purpose. The forest reserves established under the Act of March 3, 
1891, amounted to 60,851 square miles. These became final in 
