APPROACHING A TUNNEL BY THE "LEGGING" METHOD ELECTRIC BARGES REPLACE "LEGGERS"

SIXTEEN electric towing barges have taken jobs from the "leggers" who have pushed coal through the Harecastle tunnel in England for years. Some months ago TECHNICAL WORLD MAGAZINE published an account of the men who lie flat on their backs and with feet on the roof of the tunnel, shove the little boats loaded with coal, for the twohour journey. The new barges will make the trip in forty minutes. Formerly both men and women found employment

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NDER the name of the Pisgah National Forest, the people of the United States have recently acquired the largest area of scientifically forested lands in the country. It was part of the great Biltmore estate of the late George W. Vanderbilt, and comprises ninety thousand acres of wild commercial forest in North Carolina, rich in hardwood, lined with trout streams whose banks are fringed with rhododendron, and forming the most beautiful reserve in a wild state that has ever been established. It is not a ,park. It is a great forest flowing over the Southern Appalachians, a forest that will yield an annual crop of wood to the Government, just as the experimental farms at the agricultural schools yield wheat and oats to those institutions.

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Overlooking the valley of the French Broad River, this area is precipitous and lofty, a dozen or more summits of the great Pisgah Range rising above six thousand feet. rainfall is heavy, and the creeks and streams flow with swift currents which erode the steep unprotected slopes into deep gullies, carrying down into the streams vast quantities of soil and sediment from areas which have been wastefully lumbered, cleared, or burned over. The protection of the forest cover, therefore, becomes a vital factor in the navigability of the large rivers fed from this territory.

It was long ago Mr. Vanderbilt's idea to pick up tracts of wornout and devastated lands in the vicinity of Biltmore, and bring them up to a high state of cultivation and improvement, including both farm lands and forested tracts. At first he expected to content himself with the purchase of a few hundred acres, but when he began to plan his chateau-modeled house, he soon found that he was getting too much. house for his land, and then he started in to acquire other property, until now the Biltmore estate, proper, comprises

some eighteen thousand acres of highly productive farm lands, forests, and large nurseries of flowering shrubs and forest trees.

Mr. Vanderbilt's method of lumbering was true conservation. Viewed from the summits of imposing peaks, there stretched before the eyes illimitable areas of forest, some of it virgin and other portions lumbered, but under such judicious cutting that at a distance only a forester could be certain that the lumberman had been at work; to the uninitiated, the whole forest seemed practically untouched.

The lumbering contracts provide for the cutting of poplar to a stump diameter of sixteen inches, and of other woods to fourteen inches. The contracts have been on the basis of twelve. dollars an acre, and run for twenty years. These contracts will continue under federal supervision. At their expiration, the forest will be ready to be cut over again, and thereafter will furnish a perpetual income to the Government as well as fully preserve the watershed.

The simple fact that under this contract actual lumbering has been in full swing for several years at the price of twelve dollars an acre disproves the oft-repeated statement that "forestry nonsense and practical lumbering can't be mixed together", and that the lumberman must be left to his time-honored practice of skinning the forest lands and leaving a trail of waste and desolation behind him.

Members of the Forest Reservation Commission look upon the Pisgah Forest as by far the best government purchase yet made, because the forest. is in the finest possible condition and less than one-half of one per cent can be classed as burned-over land. The area also contains improvements in the form of buildings, and excellent roads. and trails, which leave the Forest Service little to be desired in connection with its administration of the forest.

What the actual value of this unex