FOREST ALIENATION. 177 
The country must have timber—that has been recognized in sinking 
over £2,000,000 on the existing timber plantations; and yet, on the 
basis of this plantation expenditure, the country is losing some £2,000,000 
yearly in alienating demarcatable forest. This waste of natural resources 
seems hardly to have been paralleled during the worst days of American 
forest history, As shown in Part II, the American reckless forest waste 
was stopped long before the country had reached the present forest con- 
dition of New Zealand. 
The New Zealand Class of Forest in Africa no longer alienated.— 
In Cape Colony forest alienation came to a definite end with the esta- 
blishment of national scientific forestry in 1883. Under British rule 
the best forests in South Africa, those of Knysna and George, were being 
eut up into lots and sold. By 1853 twenty-nine large forest lots out 
of 158 surveyed for sale had been alienated. Then in the nick of time 
came responsible government; and with the first Parliament the sale of 
the national forests was stopped, never to be renewed as a matter of 
puble policy, though there was a continual leakage of small areas, with 
the sale of farms which ‘‘a bit of bush’’ improved. This went on till 
the advent of a Forest Department and the final definite demarcation of 
the forests in 1881. 
No Forest Alienation in Fast Africa.—There is good forest of the 
New Zealand class in East Africa. At 8,000ft. under the equator it 
differs little from the sea-level forest in South Africa in the latitude of 
northern New Zealand; and it is enriched by a fine Cedar from the high- 
lands of Abyssinia. Here is the tropical bridge between the northern 
and southern ex-tropical dense evergreen forest, furnishing an interesting 
field for speculation in forest geography. The late colony of German 
East Africa got the largest share of this forest 
As soon as British East Africa started developing its temperate- 
climate highlands an Indian forest officer was obtained, and the forest 
demarcated. In 1906 came the rush of white settlement, and a detailed 
and restricted forest demarcation became necessary. I was called from 
South Africa to do it. 
In 1910 I was sent on a forest mission to German East Africa. I 
found that the Germans had already got their forests better organized 
than we had, with surprisingly good forest stations (‘“‘ Waipoua Kauri 
Forest,’’ p. 32), with roads, and some plantations of exotics; and I ascer- 
tained that their forest demarcations had been mostly completed within 
a few years after Bismarck took over the colony, while all alienation of 
good forest had definitely ceased some years hefore my visit, 
The timber-working was equally modern and thorough. At one lift 
I was carried in a cage up an aerial timber cable-way, from a railway 
nearly at sea-level, to a well-timbered plateau lying at an elevation of 
aver 6.000 ft. above sea-level. This was in the Usambara Mountains. 
(The official report of this visit might usefullv be added to the forest 
literature in the Parliamentary Library.) All this fine country, with 
a great botanic garden imitating Buitenzorg, has now fallen into our 
hands. 
MNEMONIC, 
If yearly thirty thousand acres they alienate, 
Of good, or at least restorable, forest, 
And wait but a year to demarcate, 
It’s one* plus twot millions lost, at some date. 

a ee I RS 
+ Beoause, taking £30 as an average value of present timber + discounted future timber crops, 
= £900,000. , 
ey + Becenue if it came to replanting, £50 (cost of planting + interest) + 30,000 acres = £1,500,000, 
-or. at actual rates of planting in the past, £1,950,000: say, with the rising cost of labonr, over £2,000,000, 
