GRA.VES: PLACE OF FORESTRY AMONG SCIENCES 43 



science, utilizes results furnished by the natural and engineering 

 sciences; while it is also true that the forester's activities — 

 particularly during the pioneer period of establishing forest 

 practice — may be largely administrative in character; there is 

 nevertheless a fundariiental forest science which has a distinctive 

 place. As with all others, the science of forestry owes its dis- 

 tinctive character to its correlation, from a certain point of view, 

 of parts of certain other sciences, such as mathematics, botany, 

 entomology, civil engineering, and chemistry. But these are only 

 auxiliary to the resultant science — forestry — which rests upon a 

 knowledge of the life of the forest as such, and which therefore 

 depends upon the discovery of laws governing the forest's growth 

 and development. 



It is in this field chiefly that foresters may claim some scientific 

 achievement, some contribution to general science. Sciences do 

 not develop out of curiosity; they appear first of all because there 

 are practical problems that need to be solved, and only later 

 become an aim in themselves. This has been equally true of the 

 science of forestry. The object of forestry as an art is to produce 

 timber of high technical quality. In pursuing this object, the 

 forester very early observed that tall, cylindrical timber, com- 

 paratively free of knots, is produced only in dense stands, in for- 

 ests in which the trees exert an influence upon each other as well 

 as upon the soil and climate of the area occupied by them. He 

 further discovered that the social environment produced by trees 

 in a forest is an absolutely essential condition for the continuous 

 natural existence of the forest itself. If the forester had not 

 found forests in nature, he would have had to create forests 

 artificially in order to accomplish his practical purpose, since it 

 is only thi'ough the control and regulation of the natural struggle 

 for existence between trees in the forest that the forester is capable 

 of managing it for the practical needs of man. Thus from the 

 very nature of his dealings with the forest, the forester was forced 

 from the beginning to consider the forest not merely as an aggre- 

 gation of individual trees but as communities of trees — tree 

 societies — and first from purely utilitarian reasons, developed a 

 science upon which the practice of silviculture now rests. 



