332 REPORT OF THE FOREST, FISH AND GAME COMMISSIONER. 



ad. B: Whosoever has traveled in recent years through Germany with an 

 eye to the forest cannot be in doubt that every state and every 

 county offers innumerable sites at which conservative forestry 

 can be conducted as a remunerative business. Indeed, economic 

 sites are at hand in Germany wheresoever the trees do not happen 

 to occupy farming soil. 



Such was not the case in Germany 200 years ago; and such is 

 not the case in Russia, Canada and the United States today. 



Economic sites are those where stumpage values range high; 

 where natural reproduction is easy; where the danger of fires is 

 small; where the land is unfit for agriculture; where forest taxes 

 are low. 



These conditions prevail, particularly, in the pineries of the 

 Coastal Plains and in the hardwood forests of the higher 

 Appalachian region. 



It must be clearly understood that these conditions did not 

 — or did not all — prevail some twenty years ago; further, that 

 the absence of such conditions in the West anno 1907, does not 

 render conservative forestry in the West for all times impossible. 



It is unfortunate, indeed, that the majority of these conditions 

 arises only at a very late hour, to wit, invariably after the gen- 

 eral disappearance of the primeval woods. 



No man in the United States has had, so far, sufficient confi- 

 dence in conservative lumbering to postpone the tapping of his 

 primeval woods until the ' ' economic site ' ' for conservative lum- 

 bering had locally arisen. 



The man who does will never live to regret his confidence. 



i^effjods Regulating fl)e meld in Wood and Timber 



The question as to the amount of timber which might be removed 

 annually without reducing the growing stock (the main investment) has 

 occupied the minds of foresters since many centuries. European govern- 

 ments prescribe definite methods by which the yield of a forest is to be 

 regulated. The family laws governing entailed property do likewise. 



