The most remarkable incident of the popular forestry excitement is that legislative bodies, moved to act under this excitement, take no counsel with those who could wisely advise them, but follow the lead of empirics or visionaries who, while they know a great deal about what was the direful result of cutting away forests in the old world a couple of thousand years or so ago, can scarcely tell a post oak from a pitcher plant, or plant or prune a tree successfully to save their lives. It has been the constant work of the Gardeners' Monthly to save forestry from the work of these people, because nothing so injures a good cause as egregious ignorance. Take the various timber culture acts of the United States, the looseness of which we have so often exposed. It is a well-known fact now, that, though there have been a few meritorious examples of intelligent good faith, the great bulk of the grants under the acts has been wasteful or fraudulent. In the language of a correspondent of the Inter-Ocean, "very few, if any, entering lands under the timber culture act, ever continue the culture after securing their lands, and after completing their proofs there is very little timber on the land that amounts to anything.

They simply plant a few scrub cotton-wood trees, and after acquiring the title to the lands, allow the fire to run through them, and that is the end of their timber culture."

And now, after all this, a new scheme is before Congress, called the " Dakota forestry bill," to be championed by Mr. Pettigrew, under which lands in Western Dakota are to be sold to planters of "twelve acres of timber," and so forth. It never occurs to the wise men who project these schemes that the planting of successful forests requires knowledge and skill, which not one farmer in a hundred is equal to, and that these twelve acre lots cannot possibly amount to anything of consequence, even though a few are successful in solving the great forestry problem.

But in truth it matters little, as we fancy, to the "ground floor" projectors of these schemes, whether any trees of consequence can by any possibility be made to grow in Western Dakota or not; for is there not to be a " commission of three, of whom two shall be practical (of course!) foresters?" and their huge salaries will go on from the passage of the act.

It is a great pity that there is not head enough somewhere to get forests of a few thousand acres apiece set out somewhere, with some such men as Douglas or Sargent to supervise the whole; and there would be little need of forestry commissions, whose only work is to write long-winded reports, which nobody has any patience to read after Congress has wasted thousands of dollars in publishing.

It is said that so far as can be learned, no one has availed himself of the extraordinary liberality of the Legislature of Pennsylvania, which permitted a man to neglect the public roads, provided he planted trees along their sides. The Pennsylvania farmer has no idea of sticking in the mud with his team, in order that the few score trees he may plant shall keep posterity from living in "an arid, treeless waste."

Perhaps he has studied road making as well as forestry, and has learned that roadside trees add 25 per cent. to the annual expense of road maintenance - a practical thought which probably did not occur to the excellent people who have urged Legis-latures on to these trifling enactments.