Great and important as is our list of products made from wood, we are surprised to learn that of all wood cut fully two-thirds is wasted in the forests, left to decay or burned. The largest forests are now all located far from the great manufacturing regions, and that means far from the lumber market. The cost of transportation must be added to every car of lumber sold. The freight on a car-load of lumber from the South to Chicago or other points in the middle West is not less than a hundred dollars, and from the Pacific coast it is very much higher. It does not pay to send low-grade lumber when the cost is so great, and as there is no local market a large part of each tree is burned. All the upper end of the trunk and all branches are thus destroyed, although much valuable timber is contained in them. At one mill in Alabama a pile of waste wood and branches as high as a two-story house burns night and day throughout the year, and that is probably true of all the larger mills. If the timber could be conservatively managed as are live-stock products, so that all the waste could be utilized, all the small articles, shingles, lath, posts, tan-bark and extract, pulp-wood, wood for distillation and small manufactured articles would be made by-products of the larger cuts. Much has been said of the greed of large lumber companies in causing wholesale and reckless destruction of the forests, and much of it is doubtless true, but the lumber companies cite the fact that no farmer will gather a crop of corn which will not pay for the labor cost of gathering, and say that at the present prices of lumber they can not pay the present freight rates to the factories. It seems therefore that a certain amount of waste is unavoidable unless wood-working plants are established near the forest regions. The first great step in conserving our forests is to stop the unnecessary wastes in use. The next step is to take measures to prevent the great destruction of our forests by fire. Those who have never lived in a great forest region can have little idea of the extent of the damage caused by these great forest fires. The loss of life of both man and animals, the sweeping away of houses and crops, the homelessness and misery of those who have lost everything they had saved, are not to be taken into account here, but only the loss of the forests themselves.