not been used for staves, but are reserved for lumber. These logs, with oak, maple, ash, and cherry, will cut 75,000 board feet of lumber. We have 50 cords of locust for insulator pins and 60 cords of wood for fuel to be removed from the area. The brush has been piled and will be burned when weather conditions permit.

Permit me again to mention the purposes we had in mind before the operation was started:

First. The removal of all trees necessary to the well-being of the future stand. This has been done with one exception. No trees harboring squirrels have been cut. No matter how unsightly they were, no exceptions were made in this rule.

2nd. Profit. A profit of $2.97 a thousand on the staves, $5.34 stumpage in terms of cordwood, and $10.68 a thousand in terms of board feet, was made on the operation. More than $10.00 an acre has already been cleared on land purchased by the Department for $2.00 an acre, with other profits to follow and to be accounted for.

3rd. Training for future service. That "experience is the best teacher' is exemplified in this operation. Our blue print was a memory print of a mill worked on twenty years ago. Many of the mill parts were missing and it was necessary to replace them. The hard work done by the rangers assured the success of the enterprise. 31 per cent. of all the labor expended on the operation was furnished by the rangers and the forester. The salaried men of the Department are skilled in operating all the machines and can superintend their erection and operation. We can now offer to the Department of Forestry three employes who can superintend stave mill operations. They are worth more to the Department than a 42 per cent. profit on the manufacture of keg staves.

ALFRED E. RUPP.

A Pennsylvania tannery which is about to close for want of bark, paid for railroad freight $50,000.00 in a year. For a tenth of that sum the railroad could have prevented most of the fires and maintained the forests which supplied the revenue.

Lightning does sometimes start a forest fire, but very rarely. All other forest fires result from ignorance, carelessness or crime, neither of which should go unpunished.

B

American Lumbering in France.

EFORE ever the first American troops embarked for France to take up the common cause of the Allies, the momentous question, manufactured lumber, confronted the army. Docks for unloading troops and materials must be constructed; railroads for transporting them; quarters for housing them; and most important, from the point of view of cruel war necessity, lumber for trench structures; barb wire entanglement stakes; bridge repair and construction, and road planks (5 in. x 5 in. x 8 ft. long) would be needed in enormous quantities. The army was wide awake to the fact that millions of board feet of such lumber, timbers and railroad ties must be available to make successful the operations of a large force of combatant troops. Lack of ship tonnage confronted us even for men and food, so shipping the manufactured product. across was out of the question. Consequently France and England, but mainly France, was called on to furnish the timber and we to cut and manufacture it. Of course, they did not furnish the timber without compensation. On the other hand, every foot of timber cut was paid for at, what was to us, a very high price.

It is said in the army that whenever there is hard work to be done, the engineer corps is called upon to do it. So the corps of engineers was charged with the task of supplying the American expeditionary forces with lumber for docks, railroads, etc. The task was well and thoroughly executed. Not that their methods were never open to criticism, for operations did not always run smoothly; and, from the point of view of a forester, criticisms concerning waste could almost always be made. Nevertheless, considering the magnitude of the task, and the pressing demand for immediate shipment of lumber products, waste could not possibly be avoided; intensive utilization could not be considered.

As stated, the corps of engineers was called on to be lumber jacks or at least to have lumber jacks as units in the corps. So a regiment of six companies of 160 men each (later increased to 250 men each), to be known as the Tenth Engineers (Forest) was authorized and organized. They sailed "Over There" in September, 1917. Before they were fully organized another regiment of ten lumbering companies and nine labor companies was authorized, to be known as the Twentieth Engineers (Forest). Organization of this regiment began in September, 1917, and the first six companies of 250 men each embarked