170 THE BOOK OF FORESTRY 
While there undoubtedly has been unnecessary waste 
in our logging, the chief difficulty has been in finding 
a market for the inferior grades of timber. When a 
financial panic hits the country or the lumber production 
becomes too great, the prices of lumber shrink until 
the knotty boards which can be sawed from the tree tops 
do not bring even enough to pay for their making. The 
only thing that can be done then is to leave them in 
the woods. This means waste, of course, but until the 
prices of wood products have risen to the point where 
it will pay to use such material, it must be left to rot 
on the ground. 
Forest Taxation——One of the great drawbacks to 
lumbering in the past has been a high rate of taxation. 
When timber land had little or no value and the tax rate 
was low an owner could hold his forest until a good 
price was to be obtained for his trees and then, if the 
kind of forest permitted, he could cut out only the best 
individuals, reserving the smaller ones for another crop. 
Much of the forest land in Maine has been eut over 
three or four times. 
When taxes are high, however, the owner of timber 
land is corpelled to harvest his crop to avoid loss and 
in some of the Western States where the forest counties 
levy a tax of five to six per cent per year on the full 
value of the standing timber the country is soon 
cleared of its valuable forests as a result of the high 
taxation, since the taxes would soon eat up the profit. 
If a woodlot is taxed once each year, the timber crop is 
taxed from forty-five to sixty times during its life 
whereas field crops are taxed only once. The ideal 
way of taxing forests which is being adopted by some 
of the States is to allow forest land to remain untaxe 
until the timber is cut and then when he receives the 
