EDITORIALS. 
The New York State College of Forestry. — In April last, the 
Legislature of New York passed an important Act, authorizing the 
Trustees of Cornell University “to create and establish a depart- 
ment in said University, to be known as and called the New York 
State College of Forestry, for the purpose of education and instruc- 
tion in the principles and practices of scientific forestry.” Provision 
was also made for the establishment of a demonstration forest of not 
more than 30,000 acres, in the Adirondacks, which is to be known 
as the “College forest.’ Since the organization of the several agri- 
cultural experiment stations on a national basis of support, no public 
endowment of applied science has at all approached this of the state 
of New York in prospective usefulness to the public at large. 
From an announcement of the new College of Forestry, recently 
issued, it appears that the annual consumption of wood materials in 
the United States is estimated at over 20,000,000,000 cubic feet, 
valued when shaped for use in the arts at not less than $1,000,000,000. 
Much of this material is doubtless capable of profitable, even though 
in the first instance more expensive, replacement by other material ; 
and although many notes of warning have been sounded, and for 
some years a national forestry association has occupied itself with 
the formation of public opinion, favorable to a rational administra- 
tion of our forests, it is probably true to-day that private landowners 
cannot view investment in forest lands, to be rationally administered, 
as desirable from a business point of view, partly because of the 
slowness with which returns are received. But in Europe the neces- 
sity of such administration of what is left of the original forests, and 
of the very large areas that have been planted to take the place of 
those denuded, has come to be generally understood. Under the 
management of Professor Fernow, who has been called to its head, 
the new College of Forestry may be expected to disseminate the best 
and most practical of information on all matters connected with the 
subject, and it is probable that long before the expiration of Cornell’s 
thirty years’ title to the “ College forest,” it will have served as the 
model for many and larger state and national forest reservations, 
which will be not only safely preserved but administered for the 
public benefit. 
