It is estimated that two thirds of the original stands of timber have been destroyed by forest fires, which are still causing enormous losses. Large sums collected monthly from the timber users are being spent for fire protection. Every railroad is compelled by law to maintain extensive patrols on account of the sparks from locomotives. Several of the provinces use airplanes equipped with wireless telephones or radios to enable their observers to report instantly any blaze they discover. Some of these planes are large enough to carry crews of eight or ten men, who swoop down upon a burning area as soon as it is sighted. In Manitoba an airplane recently carried firefighters in thirty-two minutes to a forest that was three days’ canoe journey from the nearest station. Suppose we go up in one of these patrol planes, and take a look at the forests of Canada. We shall have to travel over one million square miles, for that is their area. One fourth of the land of the Dominion is wooded. The forests begin with the spruces of the Maritime Provinces and the south shore of the St. Lawrence and extend across the continent to the Pacific slope, and northward to the sub-arctic regions. There is still much hardwood left, especially north of the Great Lakes, but the conifers, or evergreens, make up about eighty per cent. of the standing timber, and furnish ninety-five per cent. of the lumber and the pulpwood. In passing over southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, we shall see a vast area of prairies, the lands which now form the great wheat belt. The foresters say this land once had forests but that they were destroyed by fire in ages past. We see the finest trees near the end of our air journey. This is in British Columbia, a province that contains the largest, most compact, and most readily accessible stand of merchantable timber in all the world. It has more than half the saw timber of Canada. In this area, which includes the Rocky Mountains, the Douglas fir is the predominant type. The trees are sometimes forty, fifty, and sixty feet thick, and a single log will make a load for a car. A whole tree may fill a train when cut into boards. Here sixty-foot timbers that will square two or three feet are nicknamed “toothpicks.” Twenty years ago the chief commercial wood of Canada was white pine. It was then the aristocrat of the north woods, and was cut from trees between one hundred and fifty and three hundred years old. Its place has now been taken by the spruces, of which there are five varieties. The spruces form about one third of all the standing timber of Canada. The annual cut amounts to something like two thousand million feet, or enough to build a board walk sixteen feet wide all the way around the world. Notwithstanding this the government foresters estimate that within the last twenty years insects and fires have destroyed twice as much spruce as the lumberjacks have cut down.