14 
which is felt by the farmers in western New Work and elsewhere. It is 
the shelter which the wood lot offered. Now, with the country unduly 
opened, spring opens later. The young cattle that used to be turned 
out into the wood-sheltered’ pasture about the Ist of April now are kept 
shut up until the middle of May. Peach orchards in Michigan have be- 
come impossible in many sections, and those that were sure to be loaded 
every year with luscious fruit now furnish a good crop only as an ex- 
ception, and so it is with apples. Droughts in summer and floods in 
spring time are more frequent and more destructive because the temper- 
ing shelter belt and the forest floor are destroyed. 
There are also in all parts of the country large mountain areas which 
with their declivities and thin soils offer little or no inducement to agri- 
cultural use and are best kept under forest altogether, partly because 
that is the most profitable use of the soil, partly because a forest cover 
is here of most benefit in re gulating water conditions, and for this reason 
the method of managing here must be such that regard to these condi- 
tions forms the first consideration in the use of the forest, production 
of material and values only the second. 
Forestry here carried on with the care which such conditions demand 
may not prove prolitable to the private owner, aud therefore such for- 
ests should be owned, controlled, and managed by the community or 
the State as an object of public concern, like roads, canals, harbors, and 
similar public improvements; the interest of the community being here 
more concerned than the pocket of the individual. 
‘ WHAT FOREST MANAGEMENT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT. 
The popularly expressed idea that forest management consists in 
cutting the mature trees is about as childlike a conception as if we 
were to define banking business to consist in paying out mouey. The 
lumberman hardly does anything but take the mature trees, and yet 
he thereby in many cases injures the forest, killing out the desirable 
species and handing the ground over to less desirable growth, because 
he does not know how to cut so as to reproduce or favor the desirable 
growth. Thus the cutting of the spruce in the Adirondacks, done in 
the manner in which it is now practiced, is a practice to be utterly con- : 
demned from the forester’s point of view, because it reduces the 
chances for reproduction of the most desirable species. 
Nor does forestry consist in planting trees, after the original growth 
is removed, although that may under certain circumstances form a part 
of the forester’s task. 
Least of all does forestry require the prevention of timber-cutting 
anywhere and everywhere, for that would be to preventits very object, 
which, as we have seen, is to grow a crop, to secure, besides favorable _ 
forest conditions, desirable material for utilization. Mabel ¥ 
What is the material which a rational forest management tries to 
