A paper read before the American Forestry Congress in Atlanta, Georgia, on 1 December 1888. Reprinted from the Proceedings of the American Forestry Congress, December 1888, Gibson Brothers Printers and Bookbinders, Washington, D.C., with an introduction by Martin E. Alexander. From the introduction: "While Bell held many of the very same biases as the foresters of his generation regarding the 'mindless vandalism' caused by forest fires, he also recognized that fire played a natural role in the ecology of the boreal forest as evident, for example, by his description of the connections between fire, cone serotiny, and stand renewal in jack pine ... One hundred twenty-five years after Dr. Bell’s perceptive words were written, large-scale crown fires continue to significantly influence boreal forest ecosystem dynamics. Slowly but surely, we have come to recognize and appreciate that the attempted exclusion of fire from the boreal forest is in fact neither ecologically desirable nor economically feasible."