Excerpt from Some Diseases of New England Conifers: A Preliminary Report Very little attention has been paid to the study of diseases of forest trees in the United States up to this time, and the reasons are Obvious enough. Up to within a few years the supply Of standing timber of all kinds has been so large that a few diseased trees, more or less, scat tered over wide areas were Of little account. The lumberman cut down the sound trees and paid no attention to such as he recognized to be of inferior value. The situation has changed within the last decades, and a wide-felt demand has arisen among all classes of people for a more economical and rational treatment of the existing forest lands, and for reestablishing forests on denuded areas. In the primeval forest the trees diseased because of fungous or insect attack were ignored. They were few in comparison with sound trees, and the price of a single tree was very low. At the present time, with a marked appreciation in the value Of timber, the agencies which injure trees for timber are of more immediate interest to the owners of woodlands. At this time the extent to which insects and fungi destroy trees can only be guessed at. Their work of destruction goes on silently here and there in the forest, and does not attract the attention of the casual Observer as do careless lumbering or forest fires. If the dead and dying trees in a forest could be collected, they would represent a con siderable percentage of the total forest. Forest fires are already not so common as they used to be, and the lumberman of today is beginning to understand that more can be realized from a given forest tract by rational treatment than by indiscriminate cutting. Insects and fungi, and other harmful agencies Of less importance, are being studied with the aim of arriving at a more complete understanding Of their manner of working. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.