Another of the large States to start upon and, differently from New York, to develop consistently a proper forest policy, was the State of Pennsylvania. As a result of a persistent propaganda by the Pennsylvania Forestry Association, formed in 1886, and especially by its active secretary, Dr. J. T. Rothrock, a commission of inquiry was instituted in 1893. Before its report was established, the legislature of 1895 provided for an executive Department of Agriculture, and included in its organization a provision for a Division of Forestry, the botanist member of the previous commission, Dr. Rothrock, being appointed Commissioner of Forestry at the head of the Division. Two years later, the final legislation, which firmly established a forest policy for the State, was passed namely for the purchase of State forest reservations. All later legislation was simply an expansion of these propositions. By 1910, the State had acquired by purchase, wild, mostly culled lands to the extent of over 900,000 acres, and the Commission had progressed far towards providing for their management and recuperation. The unusually disastrous conflagrations of 1894; the growing conviction that the pleaders of the exhaustibility of timber supplies were right, accentuated by a rapid decline in White Pine production and a rapid, and, indeed, almost sudden, rise in stumpage prices; the example which the federal government had set in withdrawing public timberlands from spoliation; together with an increasing number, not only of advocates of saner methods, but of technically educated men, who came from the schools lately organized--all these influences had worked as a leaven in all parts of the country so as to bring in the new century with a realization of the seriousness of the situation. And, within the first seven years of the century, the change of attitude, at least, was almost completed in all parts of the country, and among all classes, the lumbermen and others depending directly on wood supplies becoming especially prominent in recognizing the need and value of forestry. State after State came into line in recognizing that it had a duty to perform, and in some way gave expression to this recognition, so that, by 1908, hardly a State was without at least a germ of a forest policy.