acquired so great an importance is significant of the position it held at the period. In spite of the early attempts to make use of it for railway sleepers (I, p. 507) it had advanced but little in commercial importance by 1900. Ribbentrop continues:

"Of somewhat peculiar interest is the reproduction of Juniperus excelsa in the west of India. The tree as it grows there is very tapering, the timber is knotty and yields inferior firewood only, but it represents the main portion of the wood supply of those arid hills. For years it was believed that no natural reproduction took place at all; but this is not the case, and a fair supply of seedlings is found under the shelter of the long, drooping branches of the parent trees, which almost sweep the ground. Naturally nothing can be done under such circumstances beyond insisting on a careful fire protection and exclusion of grazing wherever exploitation takes place."

No mention is made of another important tree in the hills of this western region, viz.-the Chilgoza pine (P. Gerardiana). The forests of this species were chiefly on the frontier and were owned by the border tribes, who in the southernmost areas were under British political officers. There were several fine, if small, forests of this species in Northern Zhob which were being seriously mismanaged, chiefly by grazing, at this period. The regeneration was, however, impeded owing to the seed of this pine being edible and an article of some commercial value. The tribesmen collected the cones in a most crude fashion, breaking the branches and deforming the trees in the process, opened them by heat and extracted the seeds for sale. Reference to these forests will be made in a later part.

There remains for a brief consideration in this section the question of thinning. To the professionally trained Forester the necessity of thinning woods throughout the greater part of the rotation is one which precludes argument. The question of introducing orderly thinning arrangements into the vast areas with which the Department had to deal in India was one which made but scant progress during this period in the majority of cases. The paucity of staff and the fact that the bulk of the subordinate staff was untrained offered an insuperable barrier to the progress of this work. The trained officer of the Controlling Staff was well aware of the injury taking place to his crops, that their development was being retarded and that the final yield in material would be reduced-perhaps largely reduced. But he was equally cognisant of the fact that thinning operations done badly do more harm than good to the

CHIR PINE (PINUS LONGIFOLIA) FOREST SHOWING NATURAL REGENERATION IN THE FOREGROUND. LODH, KUMAUN, N. W. PROVINCES, OCTOBER 1890

Photograph by Sir Eardley Wilmot

crop. With his heavy administrative work he was unable to supervise this work himself, save in a spasmodic manner, and his staff were incapable as a whole-brilliant exceptions there were of undertaking it. A further difficulty confronting him, even had he the time or staff, was the cost involved-since the thinnings in the younger crops, owing to the extensive areas under his charge, were unsaleable save in the cases where a dense population lived in the neighbourhood of comparatively (for India) small forest areas. To the end of the period as a general rule, therefore, thinning operations had not begun to be undertaken to any serious extent in the bulk of the forests under the Department. The species in which some headway had been made were the sâl and deodar. In the case of plantations the position was different. In these thinning operations were undertaken with care. In Burma it had for some reason been hoped that the teak plantations formed by the taungya method would to a great extent clean themselves and thus obviate the necessity of early thinnings. This hope proved elusive, and considerable anxiety was being felt at the end of the century in this matter, the imperative necessity of commencing thinning work in some of these areas having been realised. The great difficulty in this connection was the inadequacy of the staff in Burma to cope with this work.

CHAPTER XIX

THE INTRODUCTION AND GROWTH OF FOREST WORKING

T

PLANS IN INDIA, 1871-1900

HE credit of having been the first to introduce a simple form of forest working plan in India must be ascribed to Mr. Munro, who was Conservator or Superintendent of Forests in Travancore in the 'twenties and 'thirties of the nineteenth century. Munro had made some study of the teak and its rate of growth, as has been detailed in Vol. I, pp. 73-4, his figures being based, as he says, on his "own personal observation and the experience of nearly twenty years in the woods." He makes some scathing remarks on the subject of the unchecked, reckless and wasteful felling by contractors in the Malabar Forests, and added that a Parsee contractor had commenced the same devastating methods in some Travancore Forests, operations which Munro was able to have stopped. That Munro was working his forests with some knowledge, based on a computation of their contents-in other words, that he had a simple form of working plan in force for teak-is evidenced by his estimate in 1837 that he would have " 100,000 trees fit to cut that season." Nowhere else in India at that period, or for long afterwards, could such a forecast have been given with any pretence at real accuracy.

We have seen that at a later date Cleghorn, during the period he was Conservator in Madras, endeavoured to obtain figures of the contents of the remaining teak forests with the object of checking over-felling.

In Burma the first officer who attempted to obtain figures on the rate of growth of teak in the Tenasserim Forests was Captain Tremenheere (vide I, p. 158); and Captains O'Brien and Guthrie made some attempts to carry on this work in the same Province.

It was McClelland in Pegu who first suggested the safeguarding of the forests from over-cutting by adopting a definite