THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. [May 1, 1901. 
order to protect the forests themselves. They affect 
to regard the woods as part of the balance of Na- 
ture, which must not be disturbed to tiie possible 
detrimentof the community. Parts of the steppes 
are beina; planted, and all woods cut down are 
at once replenished with a suitable stock. The 
general aim of the Government is to bring the 
line of the woods further South, where they will 
be useful to protect the corn-growing plains, as 
well as nearei- to the navigable parts of the great 
rivers pouring inlo the Euxine and Caspian. 
DR. SCKMCH'S outlook 
over the world's forests is not only com- 
prehensive but detailed. He knows, so to 
speak, where the shoe pinches, and shows the 
present uselessness of great areas of wikl timber 
for the wants of the hour. All Northern Siberia 
is covered with v.'ood, — but it is too far off for 
transport. The United States' lumbermen have 
been so wasteful that the Government have had to 
take over the woods and limit the output. It is 
impossible, he thinks, for the United States to go 
on for any time spending the capital of their trees. 
For some yeais thay have been using 33 per ceat 
more timber annually than their woods can replace 
by natural growth. He is probably rather too 
pessimistic on the subject of Canada. That is, 
except the prairie region and the barren lands, one 
immense forest or wood. It is the perfection of a 
timber ground, for all through these forests there 
are lake's, rivers, and streams without end, almost 
naturally connected, to transport the trees by the 
only means which paya in the timber business, 
viz.', by water. The Dominion now draws £700, OCO 
a year from these forests, wdiieli cover with spruce, 
pine, maple, poplar, and oak a region nearly as 
large as the whole of the Indian Peninsula. The 
corn-growing region seems already marked out by 
the natural absence of forests. The prairies of Mani- 
toba are already clear, so that the ground on which 
a natural crop stands ready need not be ravaged 
to make room for the first necessity, — bread. 
Mining and manufacture are inireasintr in the 
Dominion, and with a concurrent demand for 
timber, whicli will be a sonrce of revenue, there 
is every reason to think that the 
CANADIAN FORESTS WILL BE AN IMMENSE ASSET 
of the best kind. Among the paradoxes of the 
timber trade, pointed out by Dr Schlich, two are 
very striking. The first is a detail, but a sug- 
gestive one. In the great mahogany-exporting re- 
gions on the Caribbean Sea, the export is almost 
balanced by the import of building wood, 
though the mass of the Central American forest 
lies behind them and at their doors. Into the 
whole British Empire, including our Colonies, 
with their vast area of trees, we import 
£18,000,000 worti) of wood every year, and the 
amounts rise by about £700,000 per annum. It 
is from Canada, from our own great Colony only 
separated by a week's sea voyage, and not from 
Russia, that we should hope and desire to draw 
the pine and fir for our ordinf^ry domestic use. 
The hard wiods of the Dominion will probably 
be needed for home use and for the States soutli 
of the great lakes. But it is a pleasant and prob- 
able ffti'ecast to picture the millions of a'T"s of 
the great Canadian woodlands preserved ai:d proS" 
])erous, the forest populous with deer and muu.^c, 
the lakes and innumerable rivers full of trout and 
salmon, at once the source of riches to Canada 
and the great reserve for sport and recreation for 
Jinglislimen nt home and over the seas, 
If there is a real rise in the price of timber 
before the supply overtakes the demand, it may 
ENCOURAGE THE PLANTING OF WOODS 
la this country. We wish it were possible now 
to advocate this as a commercial enterprise. Bat 
common knowledge holds the contrary opinion, 
and Sir W Thiselton-Dyer himself, under whose 
control Kew has become more than ever a prac- 
tical oracle on the natural products of earth, holds 
that, as things are, it can never paj' 4 per cent. It 
has been SriiJ by good authorities that land let- 
ting for less than 7s per acre will, as a 
rule, pay Mdien planted. There is also a great 
sentimental inducement, to do so. The present 
rating of plantations is almost Turkish in its 
strangling effect. The ground is rated as soon as 
it is planted. Not a penny comes in for at least 
ten years, yet tlie rates may be anything Irom 2s 
per acre upwards. The rate might be urop[ied and 
deferred, and then re-imposed in the form of a duty 
when the trees are felled. This would make tlie 
heir to the trees pay the taxes, and not the 
planter of them, and would be no more a hardship 
than the payment of succession-duty. Partly 
from Its moist climate, partly from the abundance 
of liedgerows and hedgerow timber, we in this 
country have not felt the real damsige caused by 
the absence of woods which accrues in niouiitain- 
ous Italy, or sandy Germany or Russia. Otherwise 
v/e should probably give bounties f ortree-planting, 
instead of iaiposing taxes. Outside, 
IN GREATER BRITAIN, OUR NATURAL FORF.STS ARE 
ENORMOUS, 
and, on tlie whole, singularly little damaged. 
India, as Sir Dietrich Brandts has more than 
once shown, needs much of her woods for 
other purposes than timber. They are the 
great reserve of cattle food in famine, the 
collectors of moisture, the feeders of rivers, the 
maintenance of mountain waters. Still, that 
national wood reserve, with teak at one end and 
deodar at the other, yields a splendid and increas- 
ing revenue. But, by wdiat seems almost a stroke 
of luck, our other great Colonial forests have 
largely escaped the waste suffered by the other 
nations of the world. We have no part of our 
territory where the wood has been utterly or 
mainly ruined, as in Italy, in Spain, in Greece, 
in parts of Turkey in Europe, and vast areas in 
the United States. The slow peopling ef Canada 
saved her woods during the "stupid" period of 
colonisation, and now they will be preserved. 
Our greatest hard-wood province or continent is 
perhaps Australia. Only one of the native trees 
seems to have been destroyed, the red cedar, and 
that is a furniture wood. There are five million 
acres of State forests of sorts in New South 
Wales alone. The number of species of hanl-wood 
trees is unusual, and they are exceptionally lolty. 
This is one of the great desiderata of the builder, 
and one which English timber never fulfils. In 
replacing two of the cross-beams in the roof of 
Winchester Cathedral, English oak of the proper 
length could not be got at a reasonable price. The 
first ten forest trees on the New South Wales list 
average from one hundred feet to one hundred 
and fifty feet at full growth. Behind these' 
Colonial supplies lies the enormous and 
UNTAPPED RESERVE OF THE TROPICAL FORESTS 
of Guiana, of West Africa, and, if we buy 
from our neighbours, of the Amazon, the Ori- 
noco, and of the Philippines, where the trees 
average two hundred feet in height, and water- 
