CHAPTER XIV. 
FOREST ECONOMICS. 
Alarm About Destruction of Forests! For many years 
the attention of the people of this country has been drawn to the 
possibility of a depletion of our forests and a timber famine in 
the near future. But increased transportation facilities have 
made new sources of timber easily accessible to us, which fact, 
together with the use of inferior kinds of trees for lumber, has 
kept the predicted timber famine from materializing, until now 
our people have become skeptical on this point, and look upon 
these predictions as very premature. To any one who carefully 
studies the subject, however, it will be very evident that our 
supply of White Pine, that most generally useful of all our timber 
trees, is fast decreasing, and that it cannot be many years before 
this will be apparent by the advance of prices for this kind of 
timber. Most of the land of good quality in Minnesota seems 
destined to be eventually used for farming purposes, but there 
will always remain a large area of stony or very sandy land that 
will be unfit for profitable agriculture, and which will produce 
more revenue when used for the production of timber than when 
used for any other crop. There is also a large amount of land 
that will not be needed for farming purposes for many years, and 
this should grow timber until needed for agriculture. Besides 
this, with the increased value of fuel, lumber and other forest 
products, there will come a better appreciation of the importance 
of farm wood lots as a source of fuel, poles, lumber, etc., for 
farm use, and a more general disposition to save some land for 
this purpose. 
Price of Fuel. At present in the greater part of our for- 
ested area north of St. Paul the timber is greatly in the way of 
settlers, and the price of fuel is simply the cost of gathering it, 
no charge whatever being made for the wood itself. This state 
of things exists because not only in the forests but more espe- 
cially in the great area of cut-over timber lands in that section 
there is such an immense amount of dead and down timber that 
