WHAT IS FORESER ¥ 7 
I. THE FOREST AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE. 
The “forest primeval” is our most valuable inheritance. It is the 
ready cash of nature’s bountiful provision for our future. Of all the 
natural resources reserved for our use it is the most directly useful, for 
in the forest we find ready to hand, without further exertion than the 
mere harvesting, the greatest variety of material applicable to the needs 
of man, the means to satisfy every direct want of life. 
The accumulations of centuries are stored in the tree growth of the 
virgin forest and in the forest floor of decayed foliage. The giants 
which we cut down to-day are the result of nature’s unaided forces, 
which in the Sequoias have been at work for over 2,000 years, while 
rarely less than 200 years’ annual growth is represented in any of the 
trees we now utilize. 
Nature has taken no account of time or space, both of which were 
lavishly at her command; nor did she care whether the forest was com- 
posed of the timbers most useful to man; tree growth, whatever the * 
kind, satisfied her laws of development. 
“But when man begins to occupy the ground, when a erowing nation 
has need of the soil for agricultural use and for timber, when the forest 
gives way to the field and meadow, it becomes necessary in time to 
introduce economy into the use of our inheritance, to relegate the forest 
to the non-agricultural soils, and to make the soil do full duty in pro- 
ducing only that which is useful to man. 
When this stage of development has been reached in a nation, when 
increasing population calls for economical use of resources, when it be- 
comes desirable to reserve the soil to that use under which it is best 
fitted to satisfy haman wants, then a new conception of the forest 
arises. 
The “ forest primeval” then, together with the young natural growth 
of the better class, becomes ‘‘ woodlands ;” the brush lands, which result 
from the careless treatment of the original growth, become “ waste 
lands,” and the name of ‘* forest” is reserved to those woodlands, which 
have become objects of human care, producing to the fullest capacity 
of the soil the most useful material. 
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