affirmation of the sinful will to live. The reader will not expect us to attempt to explain that startling paradox here and now in the tail of a fluent paragraph. It needs, what Schopenhauer gives it, an explanatory treatise to itself; which to the reader might pass muster But we will ask him to take our word for it, that Schopenhauer strongly condemns self-slaughter; as indeed was pointed out some ten years ago by the author of an article in the Cornhill Magazine.

or not.

That necessity-or need-is the mother of invention, cannot fairly be ranked as a vulgar error. Need is the mother of all the useful arts. There, however, at "useful," we must draw the line; else we shall run headlong into the vulgar belief that need is the mother of the beautiful arts, and starve our poets, our painters, and their peers, on principle. Nay, then, but Juvenal knew better, and tried to teach men better, some eighteen hundred years ago. We know that Virgil was affluent. Donatus, indeed, makes him a millionaire. Juvenal soberly tells us that 'twas the work of a whole mind, not distraught by the sordid cares of seeking food and blankets, to pit Æneas against Turnus, and to paint the snakes that encircle the heads of the Furies:

Magnæ mentis opus, nec de lodice paranda
Attonitæ.

And so our own Spenser sings:

The vaunted verse a vacant head demands,

Ne wont with crabbed care the Muse to dwell.

PHILIP KENT.

THE ANTICIPATED SCARCITY OF

A

TIMBER.

S long as a great part of the world remained unknown, man had no consciousness of being cramped. In distance there was always a beyond; in resources there was always the practically inexhaustible. But now that the world has been measured and mapped, and no distance remains prohibitive of intercourse, man is beginning to feel a new sensation-that of being cramped and confined within very definite bounds, and of being severely limited in his resources. This is necessarily a new, a

modern sensation. The limitations of area and resources of which peoples and races were conscious in the past, were accidental and temporary. The limitations of which we are now conscious are inevitable and ultimate. We cannot make the world larger than it is; we cannot increase its natural capacity of productiveness or impart to it fresh qualities. We can call into exercise the latent forces which it possesses, but we cannot create for it fresh forces. We know the world for what it is; and all we can do is to develop as fully as possible its capabilities. In olden times there was always an horizon beyond the one we saw; now we have seen the farthest horizon. We are locked in, and are beginning to realise the fact.

This consciousness of being locked in has taken some time to become acute. Long after the geographers had demonstrated that the earth was a sphere separated from the rest of the universe by an immense distance, and even after most of the earth's surface had been actually discovered by civilised travellers, the world seemed wide enough and empty enough to make it unnecessary to anticipate any inconvenience from its limited area. It is only in modern, quite modern, times that human enterprise has so rapidly and extensively swept across the oceans and over the continents as to compel man to take practical account of the ultimate limitations of the area on which it is possible for him to act. Enclosure has been added to

enclosure, until we find ourselves within measurable distance of the day when the whole world will be enclosed.

The fact that we are rapidly approaching the ultimate limitations of the area in which we are confined is being curiously impressed upon us by a phenomenon which only the more speculative thinkers of the past could have anticipated. At the beginning of what we call civilisation, forests were in part the sources of inexhaustible raw material, and in part impenetrable regions of mystery and fear. Civilisation as it progressed found them in the way, and he who helped to clear them was a benefactor to the race. Later, much later, when timber had become immeasurably more valuable, forests were still regarded as practically inexhaustible; and, though their destruction was deplored in certain localities, it was left to the nineteenth century to awaken to the fact that it was possible so to deplete the forests as to bring about a world-wide timber famine, besides introducing calamitous climatal and physical changes in large districts. Here we come upon our new consciousness of terrestrial limitations. There are no new lands covered with virgin forests for us to discover. If we are to have in the future a supply of timber equal to our demands, we must draw it from the lands we know of; and if those lands are to continue their present supply, their forests must be dealt with much more scientifically than they are dealt with now. Thus the threatened timber famine possesses an interest over and above that which necessarily belongs to it-the interest of being one of the first practical hints that we are locked in.

Though the evidences upon which the cry of danger to the world's timber supply is based are incontrovertible, that cry --in spite of the persistency with which it is repeated-may still be met with incredulity by persons who have not paid special attention to the subject. The casual observer sees trees in abundance in most places which he visits. He may have traversed some of the forest districts of Germany and Russia, or been in the pine woods of the northern countries of Europe. The "backwoods" of America, the "virgin forests" of Canada, are terms that suggest to him timber resources, the exhaustibility of which he may imagine that we can safely leave to be discussed by our descendants. Then he is apt to mention loftily the unsurveyed tracts of Central Australia and Central Africa, with an incidental reference to South America. He knows of the immense forests in India, and has perhaps heard of the enormous band of untouched forest land that stretches across Asiatic Siberia. In the face of all this, the cry of alarm raised appears to him unnecessary, not to say ludicrous. But the initiated

know better. They know that the enormously increased and still rapidly increasing modern demand for timber of all kinds has already made very serious inroads upon the more accessible forest territories of the world; that the timber has been, and in many parts still is, felled in such a way as permanently to disafforest the districts in which it grew; that the timber-producing countries are every year becoming more and more timber-consuming countries in the sense that they either do, or soon will, need all their own timber for their own use; that some of the world's forest lands are so far away from, and so inconveniently situated with respect to, the chief importing countries, as to make the cost and trouble of conveying thence heavy timber prohibitive until famine prices are reached; that, in a word, the present commercial demand for timber is so rapidly overtaking the present reproduction of timber throughout the world, that unless energetic measures on a large scale are very speedily taken to secure an adequate annual reproduction a very near future will find the cry of alarm converted into a universal lamentation over actual calamity. Because a man can lose himself in a wood even in comparatively woodless England, or can find in an hour's stroll a number of magnificent park trees, it does not follow that there is a plethora of timber in the world. Besides its annual crop of native timber, Great Britain is buying every year many million pounds worth of foreign timber, and is every year increasing its purchases. Trees do not grow up like corn or cabbages. Few are worth much in less than fifty years, and many require two hundred years to give them their full value. From these data it is not difficult to discover that, unless care is taken to secure adequate reproduction, the world's consumption of timber must speedily overtake the world's supply.

This is by no means all. A timber famine would be an enormous commercial and industrial calamity, and would prejudicially affect the conditions of life to an almost inconceivable degree; but an equally if not a more serious result would be the effect produced upon climate and upon the general fertility of the earth by an excessive diminution of forest areas. How great have already been the changes produced in the character of certain lands by the destruction of forests is not at present known to, or if known is not seriously considered by, the public at large. Influences that operate slowly and obscurely are easily overlooked, though their effects may in the long run be most disastrous. It may appear to the unobservant and thoughtless a ridiculously far cry from the reckless destruction of forests to the spread of sandy deserts and arid tracts during historical times over Northern Africa, South-Western Asia, and Southern and

Western Europe. Yet the two phenomena are connected as cause and effect. It will be one of the politico-scientific tasks of the future to determine what ratio must be maintained between the area of woodland and of open country, in order to ensure the continued fertility and habitability of the open country. No development of industrially applied science, no political sagacity, no intellectual culture, no social system which does not practically recognise the necessity of preserving an equilibrium in the great natural conditions of the earth's surface, will save man from ruin. Not only is man "locked in" here upon this globe, but he is able to make his world unfit for him to live in. He can convert his garden into an uninhabitable desert; and he can do this with a facility of which very few appear to have any conception. He has only to go on for a few generations doing as he is now doing, supplying the year's market with the produce of a century, and making no adequate provision for the supplies of the future. The homely old phrase, familiar to agriculturists, about "eating the calf in the cow's belly," describes what is merely a trivial blunder in comparison. Corn and cattle can be speedily and easily reproduced; but not so trees and forests. Not only do trees require many years to arrive at maturity; but forests when recklessly destroyed are restored with extreme difficulty, and conditions are only too easily set up which render such restoration almost impossible.

This article might be lengthened indefinitely by adducing a multitude of facts in proof of the above assertions. These facts have long been known to experts, and to a small portion of the reading public. Action has been taken in some countries; but that action is still too local, and in its totality altogether inadequate to the urgency of the case. It is not enough that a few nations should preserve their forests at home. What is urgently needed is that the great timber-producing regions of the world should be protected from the calamity that threatens them, and through them all the peoples of the earth. The problem is both a domestic and a cosmopolitan one; but to no Great Power is it more interesting than to the British Empire. In one form and another Great Britain consumes more timber than any other Power. Not one of the other important old countries produces at home less timber relatively to its size. On the other hand, Britain owns, in her dependencies and colonies, more forest land than any other Power in the world; and though her Indian forests are comparatively well taken care of, her colonies are very urgently in need of some action to prevent the reckless and wasteful destruction of their valuable timber treasures.