FOREST CONTROL

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 208, 30 May 1936, Page 7

FOREST CONTROL

Struggle Through the Ages

The long struggle between those who desire to keep set aside portion of the land for the growing of timber and to protect the forests, and those who desire the land to be converted to other uses was one of the interesting facts brought, out in a paper on "Forestry Through Ihe Ages,” which Mr. C. M. Smith, of the Slate Forest Service, read before I lie Wellington Philosophical Society tliis week. Mr. Smith traced references to forestry from early Biblical times, through English history when the use of wood for ships made timber supplies, both domestic and foreign, of the utmost importance in national policy, to modern times. "We are back to forestry as a sociological problem, and the point of interest is whether history, will repeat itself in British countries and the forests of the country's well-being disappear before the country's ease and pleasure of the moment,” Mr. Smith said.

The lecturer said that some historical writers, including Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, had given quite ihe wrong idea about the purpose of the forest laws of former times. It was not realised that forest law went back to the times of Canute at: least; that the forest laws were administered by special forest courts (eyre motes) ; ami that, they conferred rights and privileges as well as penalties. Perusal of the long records of the verdicts of ihe eyre-motes did not confirm the popular ideas of the historical novel and the Robin Hood legend, that the usual penalty for killing a deer was speedy death without trial.

But that fallacy was firmly fixed in the head of every British child from liis earliest years, and he grew up with the firm conviction that forest laws and forest control were marks of serfdom Rollin Hood and Sir Walter Scott had much to answer for.