72 FOKEST CUIiTUEE AND 



we like, whole forests of them on sub-alpine heights, 

 never yet thus utilized. 



Suppose we reckon that one hundred forest - trees 

 would be required to be planted on an acre, allowing 

 for periodic thinnihg out ; and assuming that for cli- 

 matic and hygienic considerations, as well as for the 

 maintenance of wood supply, we should require finally 

 one fourth of our Victorian territory kept as a forest- 

 area, we would expect to possess one billion five hun- 

 dred and sixty-eight million trees, and to provide for 

 their timely restoration in proportion to their removal 

 or natural loss. 



Most of us are lulled into security by seeing that 

 we receive, as yet, our foreign woods in the course of 

 ordinary trafiSc, and we are not easily inclined to think 

 that the supply may cease suddenly, or be obtainable 

 only at an exorbitant expense. Even in the United 

 States of America there are places where the price of 

 fuel and timber has already risen fourfold. We are 

 told that recently, in the States of Wisconsin and 

 Michigan alone,, during one single year, two million 

 of Pine- trees were cut for lumber ; and it is estimated 

 that at the present rate of destruction no timber-trees 

 will be left in those States after fifty years, while it 

 will take a century to replace them, if even this be 

 possible. Quebec exported, in 1860, not less than sev- 

 enty million cubic feet of squared or sawn timber, 

 equal to about a million tons of wood — a large share 

 yielded by the Weymouth Pine (Pinus strobus) — not 

 taking into account the current local consumption. 

 This tree, yielding the white American Pine-wood,* 

 requires fully sixty years of growth before it can be* 

 sawn into timber of any good size. During the first 



