Article April 18, 1901 Issue

Forest Reservations and a Tree Museum

The Work that has been done at the Arnold Arboretum to Preserve the Western Forests.

Dayton (O.) Herald

The very considerable amount of discussion which is now being carried on regarding forestry and the necessity of national or state regulation of our remaining important forest areas, makes timely a note of the movement which began twenty-one years ago at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Mass., and ended in the reservation by presidential proclamation of a total of about forty-five million acres of the public lands as governmental forest preserves. President Cleveland's proclamation, dated Washington's Birthday, 1897, set apart over twenty-one million acres. The creation of these great public reservations has been aptly likened to some modern miracle of the loaves and fishes, in that so great a public benefit has been directly derived from the little piece of land in Massachusetts, which Harvard University and the city of Boston had set apart for the cultivation and study of the forest trees of the north temperate zone.

The taking of the tenth census was entrusted, by a fortunate choice, to the late Francis A. Walker, afterwards president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the best and ablest men that Massachusetts or the country has produced—a soldier, an economist, a statistician, an educator, and, above all, a wise and public-spirited citizen. The result of this selection was that the Tenth Census was the most satisfactory to the public, the most accurate, and the most valuable in its results of any census that had ever been taken in the United States.

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