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no use, in order to clear a larger area for the few species which he can 

 utilise." It is important also to bear in mind that this is true alike of 

 animals and plants : we multiply a few domesticated species, or such 

 semi-domesticated ones as our game-birds and beasts of the chase, at the 

 expense of other unutilised species. 



Though I do not wish to dwell to-day on the mainly economic question 

 of forest destruction, I cannot entirely ignore it. Public attention has 

 been very generally directed to the serious injury to climate resulting from 

 wholesale disafforesting in South Africa, Mauritius, Italy, and other 

 countries ; and most European countries are now awake to the serious 

 diminution in their timber supply owing to reckless mismanagement. In 

 newer lands, such as the United States and Australia, the vast areas of 

 forest seemed, however, to be illimitable. I remember a Californian 

 lumberman at the Forestry Exhibition at Edinburgh in 1884 ridiculing 

 my suggestion that there could be any need for conservation in the case 

 of the Californian Redwood (Sequoia scmpervirens), and yet the diminished 

 supply had so enhanced the price of this wood that in 1895 Mr. J. G. 

 Lemmon wrote, " At the present rate of destruction not an unprotected 

 Sequoia of timber-producing size will be left standing twenty years 

 hence." Its price has risen from $25 to $45 per 1,000 feet, and it is said 

 that to produce a sleeper worth 35 cents timber worth 187 cents is wasted. 

 At length America may be said to have awakened to the importance of 

 this question. There are now more than forty Government forest reserves 

 having a total area of nearly 47 million acres, and since 1898 private 

 owners have requested the Government to undertake the management of 

 over 4 million acres more.* " The pulp-mill is," writes Dr. Grout,t 

 " without question the most dangerous enemy of our forests. The 

 ordinary lumberman will leave enough young trees standing to practically 

 reforest the lumbered area in twenty years, but the pulp-wood cutter 

 leaves nothing but desolation." The wasteful way in which the Hemlock 

 Spruce in Canada used, when felled for its bark, to be left to rot on the 

 ground is a familiar example, though happily of the past, as was also 

 the cutting of young Greenheart trees in Demerara to serve as rollers to 

 get out the larger ones ; but of the turpentine industry in Georgia it has 

 been said that " there is no business connected with the products of the 

 soil which yields so little return in proportion to the destruction of the 

 material involved." % The Forest Reserve Board of New York, in a recent 

 report, call attention to two new industries that threaten destruction to 

 the forests of the Adirondacks — the manufacture of barrel staves from 

 hardwood, and that of wood alcohol from softwood, small species of hard- 

 wood being used as fuel for the retorts of the alcohol factories. The two 

 industries are combined from motives of economy, and result " in a com- 

 plete denudation of the tract, everything being taken, even to the smallest 

 saplings, which are split into barrel hoops. Nothing is left but a stump 

 field strewn with the dead brush from the twigs and tops. Fire is almost 



* F. H. Knowlton. Journ. New York Bot. Oard. in. (1902), and Tlie Plant World, 

 vol. v. (1902), pp. 02-63. 



f " How shall our Wild Flowers be Preserved? " The Plant World, vol. v. (June), 

 1902. 



% Wood, by G. S. Boulder (1902), p. 123. 



