The Government has 6o,000,000 acres of land in national parks and reservations, set apart since 189o. In parks all lumber ing is suspended, game is protected, and troops arc stationed along its borders to insure the carrying out of the laws. In reservations no such surveillance is maintained; the laws permit lumbering, hunting and grazing, as the tracts, once open to settlers, are sprinkled over with privately owned areas. It is the President's right to withdraw public lands from sale and settlement at his discretion. This he does to protect the head waters of streams and to save valuable timber lands and wild scenery. Much land now merely reserved by presidential procla mation will eventually be made by acts of Congress into national parks.
The Yellowstone, over 2,000,000 acres in the northwest corner of Wyoming, is our greatest national park. California has three: the Yosemite, over i6o,000 acres of the most beautiful and rugged scenery in the world; Sequoia and General Grant parks, both preserving some fine groves of the Big Trees. All three parks lie in the great Sierra reservation of 4,000,000 acres, which, with a southern chain of reservations, occupy one-tenth of the area of the state. Arizona has four large reserves, one of which includes the famous Grand Canon of the Colorado. Some of the best of the Pacific coast forests are in the Mount Ranier, Olympic and Washington reservations in Washington, and the Cascade Reservation in Oregon. The tract of over 200,000 acres, including Mount Tacoma, is now a national park.
Great areas of forest reserves check the map of the Rocky Mountain states, extending east to the Dakotas and Oklahoma, and including parks of comparatively small size. State forest reservations are not so common. New York has set a good example by providing in 1885 a pleasure ground of i,000,000 acres for the people in the wilds of the Adirondacks. It is also a health resort, especially for consumptives. Since 1895, Pennsylvania has acquired 300,000 acres on which practical forestry is to be begun. Many states, spurred to action by the falling off of the timber supply, have established forestry experiment stations. California has two such stations. State universities and agricultural colleges now offer courses in forestry, and have forest laboratories. The state of Michigan set aside a 57,000 acre tract for this purpose when its course in forestry was established. Even the prairie states have followed suit. Land that has been deforested and then abandoned by lumber com panies becomes public property in default of taxes. Such lands to a large extent should belong to the state, and should maintain protective forests, as they include watersheds, the sources of streams.
Five years ago the Division of Forestry was an insignificant branch of the Department of Agriculture, with $1o,000 a year to spend. Now it is a Bureau, with nearly half a million a year. A large body of forestry specialists trained in the best forestry centres of the Old World, are at work on special American prob lems, as members of the staff of the Bureau. Co-operation with landowners has brought under the Bureau's management almost io,000,000 acres of privately owned forest. Experts size up the problems on the ground, and the owners follow the Bureau's advice. The International Paper Company, controlling over 100,000,000 acres of spruce, are introducing reproductive forestry under Government direction. Twenty-six thousand acres in
farmers' woodlots are being managed under expert direction.
Teaching forestry in this country has seriously begun. In 1898 the New York State College of Forestry was established at Cornell University, with Dr. B. E. Fernow, ex-chief of the Division of Forestry, at its head. The four years' course provided for broad as well as technical training. A tract of 3o,00o acres, the forest laboratory, was at Axton, in the Adirondacks. After five years of healthy growth, this college was extinguished through state politics, and the hundred undergraduate students scattered to other schools to finish their studies.
The Yale School of Forestry, established in 1900, offers at present the most thorough forestry training obtainable. The Universities of Minnesota and Michigan have very strong courses. Berea College, Kentucky, and a large number of other colleges and state universities offer a year or more in forestry. In 1898 the Biltmore Forest School was opened on the Vanderbilt estate near Asheville, North Carolina, for the instruction and training of students.
Outside of the schools, a great power for the upbuilding of public sentiment is vested in the state and national forestry organisations. The American Forestry Association, formed in 1882, hinds together all interests. The official organ of this association is the monthly publication, Forestry and Irrigation.
A significant meeting was the coming together in Washington, D. C., of the destructive and constructive interests—the lumber men and the foresters—in friendly council, each recognising the claims of the other, and their interdependence and need of co operation. The American Forest Congress, of January, 1905, was an epoch-making event.
The Bureau of Forestry is the efficient head of all our forest interests. It has places to put all students who are well trained for the profession of forestry. A large body of strong young men are entering it. The outlook is extremely encouraging.
The public mind is vague when it encounters the nomenclature of a new science. Forestry, its subdivisions and synonyms, and its relation to other sciences, may be briefly set forth.
Forestry is one grand division of the great art of Agriculture, "the cultivation of the field." Silviculture and forestry are used as synonyms. Arboriculture includes beside forest trees those that are grown for their fruit, and for ornament. Hence it includes a large part of horticulture and landscape gardening— the growing of trees for any purpose. Silviculture is, properly speaking, that branch of forestry which deals with the scientific production of a crop of trees. Forest regulation is the business branch, which manages the annual outlay and returns of the forest. It has the lumbering and marketing of the crop in charge. Dendrology is one of the fundamental sciences upon which forestry rests. It is the botany of trees, and has three distinct branches of equal importance to the forester: (i) Tree physiology and pathology, life processes of trees in health and disease; (2) tree anatomy and histology, the structure, gross and minute, of trees; (3) systematic botany, a study of the kinds of trees in order to know them by name.