PRESENT CONDITION OF ENGLISH FORESTRY 35 



the owner's eyes, may be of greater importance. It is very 

 rare to find the stock of timber on the wooded area of an 

 estate up to its normal strength, and it is also rare to find 

 energetic measures being taken to make it so. Where 

 woods are, or have been, fairly well stocked with timber, a 

 policy has been too often inaugurated of annually reducing 

 the stock under the plea of thinning, while clear fellings 

 have been delayed as long as possible in order to avoid the 

 necessity of replanting. The general result is that the 

 majority of estate woodlands bring in little more than will 

 cover the cost of maintenance, while, where extensive 

 replanting operations have at last become imperative, the in- 

 come may merely equal or even fall short of the expenditure. 



There is no doubt that this state of matters has given 

 rise to an impression that woods are unprofitable, or at any 

 rate that the profit derived from them is too small to make 

 it worth the owner's while to seriously undertake their 

 improvement. When once allowed to fall into bad order, 

 or become thin and patchy, their restoration is a question 

 of time and money, and when a proprietor has other and 

 more urgent demands upon his purse he is not likely to 

 pay much attention to the replanting of his woods. That 

 planting or replanting goes on more or less on most estates 

 is well known, but it is rarely carried out on such a scale 

 or in such a way as to bring English forestry up to the 

 desired standard of perfection. The ultimate value of a 

 plantation at the time it is planted is seldom seriously taken 

 into consideration, and the general tendency is to treat the 

 prospective value of a young plantation as an unknown 

 quantity, and as too problematical to be worth studying so 

 many years in advance. The highest ambition of the 

 modern planter seems to be the conversion of bare ground 

 into something tall enough for pheasants to roost in, and, 

 that accomplished, he feels satisfied with his work. It is 

 evident that the neglect of sound forestry principles in 

 forming plantations at the present day is not conducive to 

 the improvement of English forestiy, and it is much to be 

 regretted that such should be the case. 



In the old days, as we have seen in a preceding chapter, 

 the planter always had a definite aim in view — usually the 



