ITEMS OF INTEREST February 8, 1908 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

The General Land Office asks for an appropriation of five hundred thousand dollars to carry on the field work of the bureau in the protection of the public lands. During the fiscal years 1905-1907 there were entered of record for investigation 24,459 cases of all kinds; of these, up to July 1, 1907, the agents investigated and disposed of 12,104. There were 2,243 land entries relinquished after the cases were in the hands of the special agent for investigation; 353 entries were canceled after hearings were had on special agents' charges; 367 unlawful enclosures of public lands were removed, restoring 1,940,120 acres to the open range. There were twenty-seven convictions connected with these cases. The total of moneys recovered by the Government on all special agents' cases was $3,386,251, and 2,372,223 acres of land was either freed from the fraudulent claims of title or released from unlawful enclosure and occupancy.

The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the "A. Y. P.," it is asserted, will open June I, 1909, at Seattle, and close Oct. 15. It will occupy two hundred and fifty acres of the campus of the University of Washington, a site on the terraces that overlook Puget Sound and command on the other side a view of Mount Rainier and the Cascade Mountains. The Exposition will represent an expenditure of ten million dollars, of which sum one million dollars in contracts has been let, and three hundred thousand dollars additional has been paid out for construction work. Three of the buildings, the Auditorium, Palace of Arts, and Machinery Hall, will be permanent buildings, and these, together with other substantially built structures, will be taken over by the University.

Ten billion cubic feet of timber are being cut each year in the United States, three times as much wood as is produced by the annual increment of the forests. The waste in many instances is thirty to fifty per cent of the total cut. It is asserted that if scientific forestry, such as is practised in Germany, were applied in the United States, the total forested area of the country, estimated at eight hundred million acres, two trillion board feet, could supply annually, from the natural increment of the trees, the amount of timber used to-day and provide for the demands of an increasing population for years to come.

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