III. APPLICATION OF VALUATION 



A. TIMBER CROP, ITS NATURE AND VALUE. 



Timber was not only important to man in the past, it was a 

 necessity, a basic condition to every reasonable development. With 

 the great progress in manufacture, extended use of iron and steel, 

 especially with the introduction of cement the importance of wood 

 seemed to decrease materially and it was commonly predicted that 

 wood had really ceased to be a necessity. But the actual facts, the 

 consumption per head, the great traffic, export and import of tim- 

 ber, the intimate relation even dependence of many of our industries 

 on a liberal use of wood and the unexpected rise in price of timber, 

 the world over, all flatly contradict the common assertions and 

 prophecy of the past years. (See Femow, Economics.) 



The people of Europe use more wood today than formerly and 

 pay higher prices. 



The timber import into Great Britain more than doubled be- 

 tween 1850 and 1890 and is about seventy per cent greater now than 

 in 1890, having exceeded one hundred and twenty millions. 



Germany, an exporter until i860, is the second greatest timber 

 importer in the world and this in spite of intensive forestry. France 

 is a growing importer and is exceeded in its import by Italy. 



In the United States the consumption per head has increased 

 from about three hundred and fifty feet b. m. of lumber in 1880 to 

 over four hundred feet in 1910, in spite of the fact that stumpage 

 and lumber have increased in price by about one hundred per cent. 



Our railways have not been able to free themselves from the 

 wooden tie, the telegraph and telephone lines use wooden poles, as 

 much lumber goes into ship building now as previously, charcoal 

 iron is still a preferred product, pulp and paper industries demand 

 more wood every year and nearly every new invention, even to the 

 propeller of the aeroplane calls for wood. 



In keeping with this increased demand for wood prices have 

 advanced for a century. While the price of rye, the stable bread- 

 stuff, in Prussia decreased by fifteen per cent, the price of timber 

 increased by fifty-five per cent, between i860 and 1903, and while 

 the income from the field remained nearly stationary the income 

 from forest, state forest, during the same period increased by one 

 hundred and eighty per cent in Bavaria, one hundred and forty- 



