graves: place of forestry among sciences 47 



clearly anticipated his views on natural selection in a book on 

 Naval Timber and Arboriculture," For the same reason it was 

 foresters, -who, long before the word '^ ecology" was coined, had 

 assembled a vast amount of material on the life of the forest as a 

 plant association — the basis of their silvicultural practice. Warm- 

 ing, Schimper, and other early writers on ecology, borrowed 

 most of their proofs and examples from the facts established by 

 the foresters, and the forest literature of today is still practically 

 the only one which contains striking examples of the application 

 of ecology to the solution of practical problems. 



One discovery recently made at the Wind River Forest Ex- 

 periment Station in Oregon comes particularly to my mind. 

 In northwestern Idaho where the western white pine is at its 

 optimum growth and is greatly in demand by the lumberman; 

 our former method of cutting was to remove the main stand and 

 leave seed trees for the restocking of the ground. In order to 

 protect the seed trees from windfall, they were left not singly but 

 in blocks, each covering several acres. The trees left amounted 

 often to from 10 to 15 per cent in volume of the total stand, and 

 since they could not be utilized later they formed a fairly heavy 

 investment for reforesting the cutover land. A study of the 

 effect of these blocks of seed trees upon natural reforestation 

 has proved that they can not be depended upon, at least within a 

 reasonable time, to restock naturally the cutover land. The 

 distance to which the seed is scattered from these seed trees is 

 insignificant compared with the area to be reforested. Splendid 

 young growth, however, is found here and there on cutover land, 

 away from any seed trees, where the leaf litter is not completely 

 burned. It is evident, therefore, that the seed from which this 

 young growth originates must have come from a source other 

 than the seed trees. The study of the leaf htter in a virgin stand 

 showed that the latter contained on the average from one to two 

 germinable seed per square foot. Some of the seed found was 

 so discolored that it must have been in the litter for a long time. 

 Thus it was discovered that the seed of the western white pine 

 retains its vitality for years while lying in the duff and litter 

 beneath the mature stands, and then germinates when the ground 



