SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 
Research—An Aid to Forest 
Perpetuation. 
By RAPHAEL ZON. 
The growth of forest research in. North America has been 
phenomenal. Barely twenty years ago there were no foresters trained 
in American schools. To-day there are approximately 1,500 trained 
foresters, graduates of technical schools of high standing, many of 
whom are devoting their efforts to forest research. Aside from the 
Federal Departments of Canada, Newfoundland, and the United States, 
there are now from forty to fifty State, provincial, college, and cor-. 
porate organizations engaged in the study of problems in forestry and 
related subjects. The inventory of the North American forest research, 
just published as a bulletin of the National Research Council, lists 
some 520 investigative projects in forestry. Such a growth in forest 
research has not been fostered artificially by generous Government or 
State appropriations. It is, to a large extent, a spontaneous growth 
brought about by the needs of the time. 
To appreciate the situation one needs only to visualize for a moment 
the intimate connexion which exists between modern civilization and 
the use of wood. From the cradle to the grave we depend upon wood. 
We sleep in wooden beds and walk about on wooden floors of our 
wooden homes. We wash ourselves with soap made with resin—a pro- 
duct from wood, put on our hose manufactured from wood fibre, and 
step into our leather shoes cured by tannin extracted from wood. We 
sit down to breakfast upon a wooden chair in front of a wooden table, 
read the daily news from a paper made of wood fibre and printed with 
ink manufactured from a forest product and received over telegraph 
lines supported by wooden poles. If we are sufficiently prosperous we 
may go to our office in an automobile with wheels containing wooden 
spokes, and finally settle in our office surrounded. by wooden trimmings 
and furniture, and dig into the daily letters and reports made of wood 
pulp. We still travel largely in wooden railroad cars over tracks sup- 
ported by wooden cross-ties. ‘The commodities which form the necessi- 
ties of life are delivered to us in containers, some of wood, and some of 
fibre, but practically all of forest products. About one-fifth of the 
276,000 manufacturing plants which serve our needs use wood in one 
form or another. : 
As long as our timber supply was ample and could be easily pro- 
cured by the wood-using industries at a low cost, there was not much 
thought of conserving either the forests or eliminating waste in the 
manufacture of forest products. Conditions, however, have now radi- 
cally changed. The United States, which a few decades ago was the 
‘second country in the world as regards the forest area, and ranked first 
in amount of saw timber produced, has increasing difficulties in pro- 
viding enough raw materials for the existing lumber and wood-using 
industries. The 820,000,000 acres of virgin forests of this country have 
now shrunk to one-sixth of that area. There remain now only 
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