RECAPITULATION. 179 
forests are valued at £20,000,000 (Reconstruction Committee, 1917). As 
a result of the British no-State-forest policy applied to New Zealand, 
nine-tenths of the Kauri forests have been destroyed without any attempt 
being made to establish an industry on the Gascony model, ; 
Kauri Tree of the Future,—Misapprehension has been caused by 
assuming that the economic size of the Kauri tree of the future must be 
the same as that of the large trees cut out of the virgin forest. The 
typical tree aimed at by foresters in central Europe is about 1 ft. in 
diameter and 60 ft. of bole, though in Sweden, and rather exceptionally 
in other countries, commercial milling takes trees down to 8in. and 
even 6in. diameter. It is probable that the most useful size of the Kauri 
tree of the future will be 2 ft. or 2ft. 6in. diameter, with 60ft. of 
bole, and it will reach this size in about a hundred years of age; but 
there may be little or no loss in allowing the Kauri trees to grow to a 
rather larger size, because at that age they are growing very rapidly, 
especially in the upper part of the log. 
THe Kauri Forest. 
The Remaining Kauri Forest.—The original Kauri forest was no 
doubt as irregular as virgin forest of this class elsewhere, and as one 
sees it to-day in a nearly original state at Waipoua. Speaking gene- 
rally, the best forest has been destroyed instead of being worked and pre- 
served for the Dominion. The comparative poverty and inaccessibility 
of the Waipoua Forest have been the chief factors in preserving it. 
Two types of Kauri forest are discussed in the preceding pages— 
(1) The ordinary type of Kauri forest, such as the Waipoua Forest, 
which will not be fully stocked as a normal forest for about a hundred 
years (p. 97); (2) the rich Puhipuhi Forest (p. 55), The richness and 
accessibility of the latter brought about its destruction some twenty years 
ago. At present-day Kauri stumpage (or royalty) prices, in round 
numbers, £4,000,000 was the lowest possible value to put on the public 
loss when the Puhipuhi Forest was destroyed. In the study of that forest 
I have uniformly taken the lowest possible figures. This £4,000,000 
is made up of two sums—(1) the value of the old-time Puhipuhi Kauri 
timber at present-day prices (less a small sum recovered in royalties) ; 
(2) the capitalized value of future timber crops that could have been 
got from the forest straight-away with scientific working. The area of 
the fully stocked Kauri forest was 5,667 acres—an area equal to the 
upper part of Wellington Harbour cut off square by a line through the 
main building on Somes Island. The rest of the forest only partially 
stocked with Kauri was double that. 17,000 acres was the area of the 
whole reserved forest. 
After a hundred years of ‘‘ forestry turned inside out’’ the propor- 
tion of Kauri trees in the remaining Kauri forests is now very low in- 
deed, though not so low as Teak in the Teak forest of India. Happily, in 
even the poorest of the present Kauri forests, the proportion of Kauri 
can be readily increased by the comparatively inexpensive process of 
interplanting Kauri standards—a hundred or two hundred to the acre 
—up to three hundred to the acre where there is no Kauri at all now. The 
analogy in regular foresty will be with the ** coppice-under-standard ”’ 
forests of France, where Oak stands over Beech, Hornbeam, Birch, Elm, 
and smaller trees. New-Zealanders, when they visit France after the 
war, should make a point of studying these forests. It is estimated that, 
