29 NOVEMBER 1940, Page 11

Woods and Youth Woods and forest's cover twenty-three per cent.

of the earth's total surface ; the United States has an estimated reserve of 385 billion cubic feet of soft timber, but is cutting four times as fast as she grows ; Canada has an estimated total of sixty-one and a half billion cubic feet of soft woods, and fifty-two million cubic feet of pulp-wood, but is cutting twice as fast as she grows ; in Europe the former estimate of two and a half billion acres of good timber has been reduced by a third. In England there are 3,500,000 boys and girls between fourteen and eighteen, but only one in eight is receiving education. Have the facts about timber and the facts about children some connexion? The author of Our Woods in War (Acorn Press, 4s. 6d.) thinks they have. "Youth," President Roosevelt has said, "can batter itself to death against the stone wall of political and governmental inepti- tude," and Mr. George Godwin, who also wrote an account of the Indore system practised on Iceni Farm at Surfleet, wants to see the problem of depleted forests and depleted adolescent education made part of the same problem. To me his book is a very stout and very convincing argument for the case.