The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-12-28
THE LOVE OF AGE IN FORESTS
How to Reconcile Ideal Beauty With
 Usefulness.

How to Reconcile Ideal Beauty Wit
 Usefulness.
 It is pity that an often mistake
 sentiment for woods primeval shoul
 so frequently, instead of helping to per
 petuate the forest, confirm prejudice
 against the true forester. The troubl
 is not so much that those who know tn
 importance of large forest crop forge it, as that many men and women
 thinking of the forest purely and sim ply as place of recreation and
 source of aesthetic enjoyment, associ ate the operations of the lumbermai
 with nothing but the wiping out of al
 they hold most dear, Yet virgin for
 est is an idle forest, and extensive
 tracts of useful land cannot lie perma
 nently idle in such thickly populated 1 regions as New England. The fact
 that places like the Black Forest regior in Baden-whose woodlands are more | thoroughly exploited than thy others ir | Germany-are among the most admired and greatly visited parts of Europe is a
 sharp suggestion that this fear of cut ting is exaggerated. And truly the more closely you examine it the more of a prejudice does it appear to be, and the less like reason.
 In the first place, the people who travel over the roads and trails of the White Mountains, and of parts of Maine, New York, Vermont and of oth- CT states to the south, attributing much of the charm of the country to the vir- gin character of it's forests, are reading into the scene what is not there. For, on the one hand, what they take to be an unprofaned wilderness has frequent ly been cut over once, if not many times and on the other it is impossi ble, except in the case of young woods. to tell at distance whether d forest is first growth or second. What makes the beauty of the distant noun tainside covered with trees is not that these separate trees are large and old, but that their thronged crowns present to the eye certain surface of color, form and texture The color, the form and the texture vary as the surface is composed of the tops of conifers or of hardwoods, or of trees of many sorts; they vary with the seasons, with the age of the forest and in a thousand other ways, and no one with half an eye would venture to say in general that this or that sort of growth should be preserved for the greatest beauty. For scenery lovers to call out for pri- meval forest as such, and without fur ther specification, is almost meaning less.
 Similarly, the beauty of the woods for him who, instead of gazing on them from afar, walks beneath their shade, is of so many forms that to recognize them at all is to abandon generaliza- tion. Beauty as well as ugliness, can be found anywhere, under any condi tions even where the echoes of the axe stroke have hardly died away. Indeed, if wildness is desired, there are few places which are so completely natures own as those abandoned clearings where the lumbermen have admitted the sunlight to great stretches of the forest floor. and among the scattered remnants of the old growth young veg citation. birds and beasts are thronging to take advantage of the new opportu- nities. Once get beyond the sense of the beauty of tall, clear boles rising in what Stevenson has called the crypt of the forest''-past the mere of e'ze and strength and age to just perception of the younger and more active forms of forest life, and one finds that they have a beauty and elf-sufficiency of their own.
 The reader is doubtless wondering we would disqualify all that mixture of lusty life with dis order and decay. by which a primeval 1 forest so stirs our imagination, and l which an ordered and thoroughly man ,ged forest lacks. The best virgin for asts, indeed, are what no other forests | 'an be, but in regard to certain parts of | 1ur country economic conditions make | t absolutely impossible that much first | growth can permanently endure. The l part of wisdom is to accept this fact md to grasp at the consolation which nay follow, and which will not be so after all A culed forest S not so inferior in appearance to an i'd one, and it is surprising how much if what already passes as old among he uncritical was plainly young fifty ears ago. 70 call aloud for the fores- CT, while inveighing against the ad- mission of the axe to the woods which ie is to manage, is simply to multiply contradictions. and to heap obstacles in he path of the only sort of forest pres rvation which Is ttainable-Forester