PRACTICAL FOEESTEY. 21 



WORK IN THE WOODS. 



The products of the forest are among the things which civilized 

 men can not do without. Wood is needed for building, for fuel, for 

 paper pulp, and for uimumbered other uses, and trees must be cut 

 down to supply it. It would be both useless and mistaken to try to 

 stop the cutting of timber, for it could not cease without great injury, 

 not to the lumbermen only, but to all the people of the nation. The 

 question is not of saving the trees, for every tree must inevitably die, 

 but of saving the forest by conservative ways of cutting the trees. 

 If the forest is to be preserved, the timber crop now ripe must be 

 gathered in such a way as to make sure of other crops hereafter. 



In general, it is true that the present methods of lumbering are 

 unnecessarily destructive and wasteful. This is not because lum- 

 bermen are more greedy of gain or less careful of public interests than 

 other business men, for they are not. It happens partly because in 

 this country, compared with France and Germany and other densely 

 populated regions, there is so much timber in proportion to the popu- 

 lation that it does not pay the lumberman to take anything more 

 than the better parts of the trees he fells. The lumberman can not 

 do his work unless he does it at a profit, and he must do it, for lumber 

 is indispensable. Consequently, although much of the waste in lum- 

 bering is not only unnecessary but actually costly to the lumberman, 

 for the present it is impossible to avoid waste altogether. It will be 

 easier to do so when the methods and advantages of conservative 

 lumbering, which is forestry, are better known to the American 

 lumbermen, and are therefore in more general use. Although rough 

 conservative methods have often been practiced in the past, the 

 success of the lumbermen who made the trial was generally but par- 

 tial, because their knowledge of the forest was partial also. They 

 were often deceived by underestimates of the capacity for tree growth 

 of the lands they were handling, because accurate measurements were 

 wanting, and they seldom made full use of the reproductive power of 

 the forest. More recent attempts, based on better knowledge, have 

 been successful in almost every case. 



Lumbermen in America are second to none in skill and ingenuity, 

 in the perfection of their tools, and in the effectiveness of the methods 

 they have devised. The nations of Europe, although they have given 

 far more attention to forestry than we, are very much behind the 

 United States in these respects. So it is not surprising that Ameri- 

 cans have been slow to change their methods, especially when methods 

 and lumbermen alike have often been attacked as wrongly and intem- 

 perately as the foreign methods have been praised and recommended. 

 German methods would be as much out of place in America as Ameri- 



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