And about and among these forests is the most fully developed human society--villages, towns and cities.
Practically all these forests have been several times cut over and many times burned. Individual trees about settlements are often noble and imposing, and occasional groves of fine trees are found, but the forest is only a reminder of what it was--and a promise of what it may be.
In South Jersey the contrast with North Jersey is emphasized in every way. Instead of hills and valleys the land is level or gently rolling. Near the Delaware and at numerous points in the interior are fertile soils and thriving communities, but much of the territory is characterized by sand and forests of pine, with an undergrowth of scrub oak, often covering hundreds of thousands of acres. This condition justifies the common name of the region "The Pines," though variations in soil frequently give rise to considerable areas of tree oaks, and swamps of white cedar border many of the streams.
On the sandy land profitable agriculture is full of uncertainties; but forestry is not, for there the pitch pine, though burned almost to extinction by the fires that for years swept annually across the level reaches, persists and wherever given a few years' immunity from fire, sends up its arms of living green. Here is the great forest area of the state; one of those tracts fitted by nature to maintain trees of a single kind, or single class. These "pure" forests, so called in contrast to the mixed forests of richer regions, are found in the southern states, in the far North and in the Rocky Mountains. They are easily developed, easily logged, and always will be, as they now are, the chief source of the world's lumber supply.
The key to the forest problem in New Jersey, as in every state, is the control of fire. A few years ago it was an undenied fact that more forest was destroyed by fire every year than by the ax. Burning the forest to make plow-land was justifiable when trees were an encumbrance, but the practice got us into bad habits. From being a servant, fire became a master. Without fires, we in New Jersey can and will have all the forest we need; with fires, that which is bad becomes worse.