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crying out to us to furnish them with thoroughly educated 

 foresters, to conserve and restore their fast disappearing forests, 

 or to create new ones, it is a standing blot on the institutions 

 of our country that we cannot educate and qualify at home 

 the men who are needed for this important service. Such 

 an institution would be of inestimable value to India and all 

 our colonies, and exert a most beneficent influence on the 

 management and productiveness of our home forests and the 

 rural prosperity of the whole country. The forest wealth of 

 Canada is being rapidly exhausted. The great pine forests on 

 the Ottawa, St. Maurice and Saguenay rivers, with their won- 

 derful net-work of tributary streams, are rapidly disappearing 

 beneath the ruthless ax- of the lumberman. All the more 

 accessible parts of these great forests are already cleared of pine 

 timber. That huge tract of forest between the Ottawa and the 

 St. Maurice, which once seemed inexhaustible, is fast disappear- 

 ing beneath the destroying ax." 



Dr. Hooker, Director of the Eoyal Gardens at Kew, says : 

 " Forestry, a subject so utterly neglected in this country, that 

 we are forced to send all candidates for forest appointments to 

 France or Grermany for instruction both in theory and prac- 

 tice, holds on the Continent an honorable, and even a distin- 

 guished place, among the branches of a liberal education. In 

 the estimation of the average Briton, forests are of infinitely 

 less importance than the game they shelter, and not long since 

 the wanton destruction of a fine young tree was considered a 

 venial offence compared with snaring a pheasant or rabbit. 

 Wherever the English rule extends, with the single exception 

 of India, the same apathy prevails. In South Africa, millions 

 of acres have been made desert^ and more are being made desert 

 annually, through the destruction of the indigenous forests ; 

 in Demerara the useful timber trees have all been removed 

 from accessible regions, and no thought is given to planting 

 others; from Trinidad we have the same story; in New Zea- 

 land there is not now a good Kauri pine to be found near the 

 coast, and the annals of almost every English colony repeat 

 the tale of willful, wanton waste and improvidence. On the 

 other hand, in France, Prussia, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and 

 Eussia, the forests and waste lands are the subjects of deyoted 



