Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 February 1904 — AMER CAN LUMBER SUPPLY. [ARTICLE]

AMER CAN LUMBER SUPPLY.

Prodigal Use Americans Make of Timber —The End in Sight. . It is not strange that trees were once objects of worship, and forests considered holy places. Trees are benefactors in mere ways than one—commercially valuable, and they have a still greater value for climate, and are by no means negligible as a satisfaction to the aesthetic nature. One thing is certain, countries that had laid sacrilegious hands on their trees have been c.ursed with crabbed age and barrenness. In speaking of our prodigal use of coniferous timber and the possible end of the supply, the'Milwaukee Sentinel says: “The latest estimate was an Incidental feature of a paper read by T. B. Walker, of Minneapolis, at the recent meeting of the American Forestry Association, from which the Mississippi Valley Lunfberman takes figures for interesting comparisons. Mr. Walker finds that the country still has a lumber supply amounting to something over a thousand billions of feet. “Figuring on a 2.2 per cent, annual Increase in the cut, he concludes that the 1,003,000,000,000 in the country at large will last twenty-five years, but he makes no allowance for the growth of timber In that length of time, and at the end of the quarter centuiy statisticians doubtlees will still be figuring on the rapidly approaching end. ' “But the end is coming, uevertheteM, and In a time exceedingly short In comparison with the probable life of the nation. Each succeeding estimate takes Into account smaller timber than waa measured In the last, and every tree large enough to make a scantling Is now, Included. That Is the explanation of the level maintained in the supply as shown by estimates many years apart. Mr, Walker's estimate forthe northwestern states includes, infract Is necessarily almost exclusively made up of, trees which cetimntors of thirty years ago considered worthless. His date for tiio end may have to be set back a few years, but not a grant many.—Week's Work.