Af 
Circular 211, Dept. of Agriculture 
than a bureau of information and advice. From this 
small beginning, as its field of work expanded, the 
divigion grew (1901) into the Bureau of Forestry, 
and finally (1905) into the Forest Service, with an 
appropriation for the fiscal year 1927 of slightly over 
$10,000,000, including $283,000 for the suppression of 
fires and other destructive agencies, $710,000 for cooper- 
ative fire protection, $75,000 for cooperative distribu- 
tion of forest planting stock, and $1,000,000 for the 
purchase of additional forest lands. The total of 
$10,000,000 does not include appropriations for the 
construction and maintenance of roads and trails on 
the national forests. 
To-day the forest work of the Government is mainly 
centered in the Forest Service, but the Government also 
does other forest work. The Department of the 
Interior, through its Office of Indian Affairs and its 
National Park Service, administers the forests on the 
Indian reservations and the national parks. The Office 
of Forest Pathology of the Bureau of Plant Industry, in 
the Department of Agriculture, studies the diseases of 
trees, and the branch of insect investigations in the 
Bureau of Entomology of the same department seeks 
means for controlling the insect enemies of forests. 
CREATION OF NATIONAL FORESTS FROM 
PIIRT.IC DOMAIN IN THE WEST 
In spite of the evidence of earlier recognition of the 
need for a national forestry movement, until about 35 
years ago the forests on the public domain seemed in a 
fair way to be destroyed eventually by fire and reckless 
cutting. Nothing was being done to protect them, or 
even to use them in the right way. They were simply 
left to burn, or else to pass by means of one or another 
of the land laws into the hands of private owners whose 
interest in most cases impelled them to take from the 
land what they could get easily and move on. 
Had this destruction gone on unchecked, there would 
in the end have been little timber left in the West,