BANKS.-The Report of the Comptroller of the Currency, 1900, gives the following table, which is a consolidated statement of all reporting banks on or about June 30, 1900: The following table, compiled from statistics given in the report of the Comptroller of the Currency gives data concerning the banks of States grouped in sections. The full table is found in the Report, Vol. I., p. 564. The following table, compiled by the Bureau of the Mint, shows the monetary systems and approximate stocks of money in the aggregate and per capita in the principal countries of the world in 1900. mileage of 13,730 and a capitalization of $1,150,377,000 in stocks and bonds. The sales of 1897 were 42; in 1898, 47; and in 1899, 32. The detailed list, as published in "The Railway Age," Jan. 4, 1901, will be found on page 63. Besides these transactions and the lease of the Fitchburg to the Boston & Maine, the principal events of the year pertained to the unification of various roads. The Chesapeake & Ohio passed under joint Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt control, and the Pennsylvania acquired an interest in the Norfolk & Western. The Chicago & Alton Railway absorbed the old Chicago & Alton Railroad, and the northern part of the St. Louis, Peoria & Northern. The various, lines in the Atlantic Coast Line System were consolidated, and the Southern Pacific purchased control of the Pacific Mail. The further consolidation of the anthracite coal roads was effected by the control of Central of New Jersey, acquired by the Reading in January, 1901. The anthracite coal miners' strike was settled by concessions on the part of the Reading. The strike of the telegraph operators on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe was a failure. A notable transaction at the beginning of this year was the purchase of the Pennsylvania Coal Company in the interest of the Erie Railroad. The Erie now belongs to the combination of properties which embraces the Vanderbilt system, East and West, the Pennsylvania system, East and West, the New York, Ontario & Western, the Lehigh Valley, the Reading, the Baltimore & Ohio, the Chesapeake & Ohio, and the Norfolk & Western. Other roads yielded to the consolidating tendency. In March, 1901, the Rio Grande & Western was absorbed by the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. In May the Mobile & Ohio was absorbed by the Southern Railway. The gains of the last quarter century are well summed up in "The Railway Age, " June 14, 1901: "Railroading has grown from guesswork into an exact art; disconnected, badly built, poorly equipped, unprofitable little roads have been merged into perfectly managed systems, covering thousands of miles with their continuous train service; steady reductions of rates and increase of facilities have taken from the public almost all excuse for fault finding: the era of railway strikes has been followed by a long period of harmony between the companies and their employees, and the standards of railway work and morals in all departments have been very greatly raised." The railway mileage of the United States in 1900 was 195,000; gross earnings were $1,336,000,000; net earnings, $447,000,000; dividends paid, $109,000,000; gross earnings per mile, $7,161; net earnings per mile, $2,400. The The tabulation of the gross earnings of the United States railroads is given in the New York "Financial Chronicle," March 9, 1901. The aggregate covers 176,645 miles of road for 1900. total earnings of 211 roads were $1,532,531,042, against $1,419,277,966 in 1899, an increase of $113,539,840 or nearly 8 per cent. Returns for nearly 20,000 miles were not included in the total. In the succeeding months of 1901 there have been noteworthy improvements over the earnings in the first two months of 1900. The gross earnings of 134 roads in January were $96,775,072, as compared with $87,369,280 in January, 1900; net earnings were $30,880,437, against $26, 716,410. The net earnings of 137 roads showed an increase of $3,373,066 in February over the net earnings of this month in 1900. The net earnings of March and April were equally satisfactory. The increase for 130 roads in March was $3,894,232; and the increase for 133 roads in April was $4,594,898. During the four months, Jan. 1 to April 30, the net earnings of 133 roads were $108,240,328 in 1900, and $125,024,606 in 1901. Reports of the fiscal year of the railroads cover varying periods. Recent returns are at hand from most of the leading companies, showing a comparison of gross and net earnings for the last year and the preceding year, as follows: ROADS Pennsylvania: Gross earnings Chicago, Rock Island & Gross earnings.. (for 9 mos. ended Dec.31) Southern Pacific: Gross earnings.. FORESTRY.-The latest published. official statistics of the forest areas of the United States, exclusive of Alaska and the island possessions, are those of the U. S. Geological Survey (19th Report, 1898), which give the total wooded area as 1,094,496 square miles, or 37 per cent. of the area of the country. In the Atlantic Coast States the forested area varies from 40 to 80 per cent., in Ohio it is 23 per cent. and in Illinois 18; it falls as low as 7 per cent. in Kansas and 1 per cent. in North Dakota and rises to 32 per cent. in Colorado, 22 per cent. in California, and 71 per cent. in Washington. The annual product of the forests, including lumber and fuel wood is estimated to exceed 200 billion feet board measure with a total value of about $800,000,000. In the "Forum" for October, 1900, Mr. Henry Gannett of the Survey estimates the stand of merchantable timber to be 1,380 billion feet board measure, of which 630 billion feet is in the region west of the Plains, mostly in the Pacific Coast States. Of this timber the annual cut is thought to be about 25 billion feet, which would make the supply last about 50 years if the present stand were not increased. On the basis of the present demand for wood, increment by growth, probably, barely keeps pace with the destruction of the forests by lumbering, fires and other causes. The annual financial loss from recorded forest fires is estimated at $20,000,000. Regarding Alaska the same authority states ("National Geographic Magazine, May, 1901) that "the coast, as far westward as Cook Inlet, is densely forested up to the timber line, which ranges with the latitude from 3,000 to 2,000 feet above sea level. The timber is mainly, indeed almost entirely, Sitka spruce. . . . The spruce is large and fine, as judged by eastern standards, but as compared with the timber of Oregon and Washington, which is the standard of the Pacific Coast, it is inferior, and little use is at present made of it, most of the timber needed being brought from Puget Sound. On Kadiak and the adjacent islands there is little timber and farther west on the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands none whatever, nor are there any trees on the islands in Bering Sea. The interior of the Territory is forested mainly with spruce, as far north as the valley of Koyukuk and as far westward as the delta of the Yukon. In this enormous region there must be an almost fabulous amount of coniferous timber, sufficient to supply our country for half a century in case our other supplies become exhausted." Porto Rico might seem to the superficial observer to be generally wooded owing to the luxuriant growth of trees which everywhere dot the island, but in a commercial sense it is almost entirely without forests. The only forest of any considerable extent is on the summit of El Yunque the highest peak in the island near the northeast end where about eight square miles of virgin forest has remained protected by its inaccessibility. In other parts of the island are small patches of forest which together may aggregate 10 square miles. The upland plateaus and mountain slopes of all the islands of Hawaii Territory were originally covered with forests in which were found sandalwood and other fine timbers and the best of fuel. Beginning with the trade in sandalwood lumbering combined with the destruction caused by mountain cattle and fires, has stripped large areas of every kind of growth and excited great alarm regarding the future wood and water supply of the islands. The forest resources of the Philippines are evidently very large but their exact limits have not begun to be determined as no surveys have been undertaken. The public forests are said to comprise from one-fourth to one-half of the area of the islands or from 20 to 40 million acres. There are probably nearly 500 species of trees, largely hard woods. According to Mr. Hiller of the U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, who visited the Philippines in 1900, the islands of Mindanao and Palawan have immense tracts of unbroken forests and even in Luzon where the most timber has been cut are still millions of acres of virgin forest. One peculiarity of those forests is that there are no great areas covered by any one species of trees. This and other conditions will make large capital necessary for successful timber trade in the Philippines. It is only within recent years that there has been sufficient public sentiment in favor of the protection of the forests in the United States to cause the enactment of any effective legislation for this desirable purpose. While there had previously been some feeble attempts to exercise a partial oversight of the public timber lands the real beginning of a national system for their protection dates from the passage in 1891 of an act of Congress which repealed the unsuccessful timber-culture acts and authorized the president to set aside "any part of the public lands wholly or in part covered with timber or undergrowth, whether of commercial value or not, as public reservations, and the president shall, by public proclamation, declare the establishment of such reservations and the limits thereof." This was supplemented by an act passed June 4, 1897, which embodied the results of an investigation at the request of the Secretary of the Interior by a distinguished committee chiefly composed of members of the National Academy of Sciences and which provided for the preservation and utilization of the reserves in a rational way. "The work of this committee," says Mr. Pinchot, chief of the U. S. Bureau of Forestry, "was the spring from which the present activity in forest matters was derived. The proclamation of the reserves which it recommended drew the attention of the country as nothing else has ever done to the question of forestry. Vigorous discussion of forest matters by the public press led to a widespread interest and that in turn to a keen appreciation of the value of forests in the economy of each State and to a willingness to take measures to protect them. It may fairly be assumed that as one of the results of this awakened interest, the policy of the Government forest reserves is now established beyond the reach of further question." Since 1891, 46,983,969 acres in the States and Territories west of the Mississippi River and in Alaska have been reserved by proclamation of the president,-13,457,080 acres by President Harrison, 27,035,794 by President Cleveland, and 6,491,095 by President McKinley up to Jan. 1, 1900. "These reserves are composed mainly of mountainous, rugged country, of no value for agriculture, but especially favorable for tree growth." The Secretary of the Interior is charged with the management of the reserves and performs this duty through the General Land Office, which attends to their administration and protection, and the Geological Survey, which maps and describes them. He |