THE PUHIPUHI KAURI FOREST. 65 
anything like it—viz., the value left after deducting the cost of logging, 
sawing, and putting the timber on the market. The Government 
royalty of those days was an arbitrary value fixed partly by political 
pressure and partly by the laudable desire to develop the country. It 
was influenced by the Australian rates, which represented nothing except 
a forestry worse even than the New Zealand forestry of those improvident 
days. On the one hand there was the fact that the wild forest repre- 
sented an idle capital earning nothing, and so the sooner it was worked 
the better (p. 109, ‘‘ Australian Forestry,’’ by the author); on the other 
hand the fact that the destruction of the wild forest without demarcation 
was an absolute national loss—no better and no worse, in fact, than 
strewing Bank of New Zealand notes about the streets for the first- 
comer to pick up! The forest policy of those days should have been 
forest demarcation, and the rapid development of the demarcated forest 
by means of a forest loan, which with the collateral security of the forest 
could have been raised on more favourable terms than the ordinary 
public loans. Even without development foresters could with jardinage 
(‘* selection *’) fellings have made the working of the forest pay, protect- 
ing it from fires, and starting it making a genuine though small timber 
increment (acrim). 
Thirty years ago Kauri was better known on the English market 
than now, and the big Australian softwood market, following the reck- 
less destruction of the small supply of Australian softwood (“‘ Australian 
Forestry,’’ p. 119) was then active. Thus in attempting to arrive 
at some approximation of the value of the Kauri timber wasted in the 
Puhipuhi Forest 1t would be futile to take current royalty or stumpage 
values of those days, because, in the absence of a forest policy, they 
represented nothing except a reckless extravagance, which many future 
generations of New-Zealanders will have to pay for, come what may, 
During the last few years the making of roads and railways has made 
the remnants of the Kauri forests fairly accessible to the world’s markets, 
so that prices to-day are beginning to give some indication of what is 
the real value of Kauri timber on the world’s markets. The present 
auction or public-competition rovalty on Kauri represents to a consider- 
able extent its market value, though it is still unduly lowered by the 
absence of much competition and the bad traditions of a half-century 
of “‘ throw-away’’ rates. Owing partly to industrial development and 
partly to the absence of national forestry, the English timber-market 
is by far the most important, and governs the prices of timber abso- 
lutely in the case of those timbers that are able to reach it. So that 
the high place Kauri has had on the English timber-market is the best 
indication of the intrinsic value of the timber. 
PRESENT-DAY VALUES: TIMBER OF THE VirRGIN ForEst. 
Let us consider, therefore, the value of the Puhipuhi timber at 
present-day prices, and with the better milling now in vogue. With a 
25-per-cent. milling-waste (no longer the 50 per cent. of the old days), 
10,000 c. ft. q.g. stand x 9 = 90,000 sup. ft. per acre. This figure 
multiplied by 5,667 acres = 510,030,000 sup. ft. I take 10s. as present- 
day royalty, on account of the quality, accessibility, and easy working 
of so good a stand of timber as was that at Puhipuhi. 
3—Forestry. 
