The Practice of Forestry in the British Empire

Abstract

THE practice of forestry as a science has been a plant of slow growth in the British Empire. Many reasons have contributed to this cause, the chief being the facility with which we have been able to obtain our requirements, either by imports from closely adjacent forests belonging to our Continental neighbours, as in Great Britain, or from the existing primeval forests, as in India and the great Dominions and Colonies. Forestry as a science on a par with agriculture has long been known and practised in many of the great European States. A study of the methods employed and the comparative ease with which forest property, both belonging to the States and to private proprietors, is managed and protected, will show that not only the people on the countryside, but also even the dwellers in the towns, and the great industrial classes, understand the value of forest property and to some extent the aims of a forest policy—that, in effect, the forest, in the economy of the countryside, has an equal value with the tracts devoted to agriculture.