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THE MITIGATION OF FLOODS BY FORESTRY OPERATIONS. 
I. The situation ; denudation. 
(a) The outlook serious. 
(b) European and American experience. 
II. Intelligent control of ringbarking the beginning of all remedial measures : 
(a) Shelter for stock should be adequate. 
(b) Danger of cutting trees too near the watercourses. 
III. Deviation of roads. 
IV. Falling in of banks. 
V. Floods and weeds. 
VI. Some miscellaneous factors in erosion : 
(a) Boulders. 
(b) Dead trees. 
(e) Stock. 
VII. llemcdial and preventive measures : 
(a) Control of ringbarking. 
(b) Fencing. 
(c) Embankments. 
(d) Chamfering of banks. 
(e) An American proposal. 
(/) Planting and conservation. 
1. Natural bank protectors. 
2. Other bank protectors (exotic). 
3. Plants recommended for Upper, Middle, and Lower Hunter. 
4. Nurseries. 
VIII. Summary of the measures recommended for mitigation of floods. 
If one's knowledge of Australian forestry were confined to what one sees in 
letters to the newspapers, one would imagine that its sole object is the furnishing 
of timber to the saw-miller. That is but one object, albeit an important one, other 
phases of forestry being the combating of drift-sand, planting for the mitigation of 
floods, the up-keep of river banks, the planting of shelter belts, and so on. The 
forester has as much right to claim credit in the national balance-sheet for improve- 
ments such as these as from the revenue arising from timber royalties. The report 
of the Western Lands Commission has vividly brought home to us, a Jew years ago, 
the fact that dealing with sand-drifts is not a coastal question confined to Sydney 
and Newcastle, but one of magnitude to the far West, and one that must be coped 
with unless we are prepared to abandon large areas of pastoral country. The 
question of dealing with drift-sand belongs properly to a Forest Department, and it 
