New Brunswick is now engaged in the work of mapping and classifying lands still in posses sion of the Crown, and in the course of two or three years will have a close estimate of the amount of timber thereon. The present esti mate for the whole province (Crown lands and alienated lands) is 12,000,000 acres, carrying 22,000,000,000 feet of saw timber — mostly spruce, pine, tamarack and cedar.
Quebec has at least 265,000,000 acres of nearly pure coniferous forest, 52,000,000 acres of mixed conifers and hardwoods, and 5,000,000 acres of hardwoods, but no reliable figures are available for the amount of standing timber. Most of it is more suitable for pulpwood than for saw timber, although large quantities of the latter are taken out every spring—especially from lands tributary to the rivers flowing into the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa rivers.
Ontario probably has more saw timber than any other province except British Columbia. The northern forests contains something like 180,000,000 acres of spruce, jack pine, balsam fir and tamarack (much of it of little value), and the southern forests about 100,000,000 acres carrying approximately 200,000,000,000 feet of saw timber. In 1917 the Department of Lands and Forests made extensive preparations for the organization of a thoroughly efficient fire pro, tection service, and introduced stringent regula, tions regarding the disposal of logging slash, which in times has been a menace to both lump bermen and settlers. , In the case of the °Prairie there are less than 11,000,000 acres of timberland with a total stand of approximately 42,000, 000,000 feet of timber distributed as follows: Manitoba with 1,920,000 acres and 6,850,000,000' board feet; Saskatchewan, 3,584,000 acres and 14,000,000,000 board feet; Alberta, 5,416,000' acres and 21,000,000,000 board feet.
In the Yukon and Northwest territories the timber has practically no commercial value, because of its inaccessibility, smallness and low stumpage per acre.
In British Columbia the forest branch esti mates the total stand of commercial timber at somewhere between 350,000,000,000 and 400, 000,000,000 feet. Approximately one-third of it is Douglas fir and one-fifth western cedar; the remainder being almost entirely made up of western hemlock, larch, yellow pine, white pine and jack pine. The estimate of timber suitable
for pulpwood is placed at 250,000,000 cords. .
From the above estimates it will be seen that the total amount of merchantable saw tim ber is somewhere in the neighborhood of seven hundred billion feet — approximately 28 per cent of the merchantable timber in the United States of America.
Annual Cut of Nearly all the coniferous timber cut in the eastern and cen tral parts of Canada is floated down the creeks, lakes and rivers to convenient milling points, from which it is shipped by rail or water to market. In the case of hardwoods the usual method of removal is by sleigh-haul, as they are generally used for fuel, distillation, cooper age—only a limited amount being used for furniture and interior finishing. In British Columbia the absence of drivable streams ren ders the use of logging railways, yarding en gines and aerial skidders necessary for the removal of Douglas fir and other large timber.
For the year 1915 the production of sawn lumber was as shown below: The value of this cut of lumber was esti mated at $61,919,806, which gives an average price of $16.11 per M. Although 25 different kinds of wood were sawn; the five leading species being spruce, which made up 40.7 per cent of the total cut; white pine (eastern and western) 22.1 per pent; Douglas fir 11.8 per cent; hemlock (western and tasters) 6.2 per cent, and balsam fir 6.1 per cent. For the re maining 13.1 per cent of the total cut the next five species were red pine, birch (yellow and white), cedar (western and eastern), maple (sugar and red), and larch (western and east ern) which made up 10 per cent of the total cut. The remaining 3.1 per cent was made up of western yellow pine, jack pine (eastern and western), basswood, elm, ash, poplar, beech, oak, yellow cypress, hickory, chestnut, cherry, butternut and walnut.
The quantity of lath manufactured was: Totals 793,226 l00.0 The total value of the 793,226,00 lath sawn was placed at $2,040,819, which gives an aver age price of $2.57 per M. The five leading species of wood used were spruce, white pine, cedar. Douglas fir and hemlock.