"Why did you start that fire?" asked Dr. John P. Shea of a number of mountaineers. Among the answers:
"Kill snakes."
"Burn out the ticks."
"Get shet of the boll weevils."
Dr. Shea did not believe them. A U. S. Forest Service official, he had been puzzled by large numbers of fires destroying timber from Louisiana to Virginia. Half of all U. S. forest fires occur in the South. Convinced that nine-tenths of them (nearly 60,000) were started on purpose, he launched an inquiry in the field of social psychology. He found a "typical area" of 440,000 acres in the...
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