No accurate record of the entire amount of lumber produced was made in the first decades of the industry, but in 1890 Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were cutting more than one-third of all the lumber supply of the United States, and to this Michigan contributed one-half the amount credited to the three states, and one-fifth of the whole product of the country. Four-fifths of Michigan was then reported to be forested,--a record leading that of any other state. As early as 1850 the Michigan lumber business was so large as to attract attention throughout commercial centres of the country, and it grew with the amazing rapidity of all western development. In 1854 there were in the state sixty-one sawmills with an output of 108 million feet; in 1872 there were fifteen hundred sawmills, to say nothing of all the other activities incident on lumbering, such as making shingles and planing. By 1881 the amount had jumped to nearly forty million feet, and it was calculated that the output of Michigan mills that year would have loaded a train of cars nearly twenty-five hundred miles long. These figures have come from the western states, but here as everywhere else the cities and states of the lakes show their interdependence. Buffalo, at the eastern extremity of Lake Erie, becomes one of the leading lumber markets of the world by reason of the immense shipments that come to it from the upper lakes. In 1907 Buffalo had one hundred and thirty-two lumber firms, and an annual output from her yards of over two hundred million feet of pine and over one hundred and fifty million feet of hardwood. This product was made up of the best species of pines, sought for by all dealers, and the hardwood embraced every known variety of American trees. It is beginning to be evident that this pace cannot be kept up without exhausting the forests. In 1903 the cut from the three northern states was not fifty million feet, a smaller cut than any year since 1878 and hardly more than half that of 1890. To the danger involved in reckless cutting without reforesting our people and legislators have become aroused, and these states are matching their past leadership in output by a corresponding activity in protecting their forest areas. Minnesota led in having an effective system of fire-wardens, and each state is creating forestry commissions and buying up preserves. In thus rescuing from destruction our forests no one can be too prompt or too energetic. Less than a hundred years of occupation of the lake region must not wipe out this industry or destroy the natural beauty and resources of the country. The fur trade had to go before the advance of civilization; the lumber industry must not be allowed to follow in its wake.