pened to settlement, is directed from this Branch.

The uses to which National Forest lands are put are almost unbelievably
various. Barns, borrow pits, botanical gardens, cemeteries and churches,
dairies and dipping vats, fox ranches and fish hatcheries, hotels,
pastures, pipe lines, power sites, residences, sanitaria and
school-houses, stores and tunnels, these and many others make up, with
grazing and timber sales, the uses of the National Forests, for which
already more than half a million permits have been issued. This work
also falls to the Branch of Lands.

The sixth branch, that of Forest Products, is concerned with the whole
question of the uses of wood and other materials produced by the forest.
Its principal work is conducted through the Forest Products Laboratory,
in cooperation with the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Here timber
is tested to ascertain its strength, the products of wood distillation
are investigated, wood pulp and paper studies of large reach are carried
on, the methods of wood preservation and the results of applying them
are in constant course of being examined, and the diseases of trees and
of wood are studied in cooperation with the Bureau of Plant Industry of
the United States Department of Agriculture. The consumption of wood,
and the production of lumber and forest products, are also the subject
of continuous investigation, and various necessary special studies are
undertaken from time to time. At the moment, an effort is under way to
find new uses and new markets for wood killed by the chestnut blight in
the northeastern United States.

The seventh branch has to do with the study, selection, and acquisition
of lands under the Weeks law, in accordance with which eight million
dollars was appropriated for the purchase of forest lands valuable for
stream protection, with particular reference to the Southern
Appalachians and the White Mountains of New England. The examination of
the amount of merchantable timber on lands under consideration for
purchase, the study of the character of the land and the forest, and the
survey of the land keep a numerous body of young men very fully
occupied. Their task is to see that none but the right land is
recommended for acquisition by the Government, that the nature and value
of the lands selected shall be most thoroughly known, and that the
constant effort to make the Government pay unreasonable prices or
purchase under unfavorable conditions