86 AMERICAN FORESTEY 



by the wayside as the case may be. Useful work this when well directed and 

 carried out, but the same rule holds as before that no very great number of 

 men can be supported in it. The case stands the same with the teachers. 

 These will be maintained only to the extent to which there are those to be 

 taught 



But there is a sense, as consideration will show, in which all these classes 

 of men are hardly to be called foresters themselves at all. They teach forestry, 

 study forestry, make forestry possible, but forestry itself as an art, consists 

 in practice, in the intelligent management of forest land ; and the forester 

 is or will be the man who directly carries out this work. Such when inde- 

 pendentl}' looked at seems to be the simplest and most evident meaning of 

 the terms. Such men are the foresters of Europe, or nine-tenths of them 

 are. This direct and practical conception, some believe, is a very important 

 one for the schools to grasp more clearly at the present time. 



FORESTRY WORK IN THE WEST 



The truest representatives of the forestry profession, as it exists in the 

 country today, are probably the men who after the sifting of the last half dozen 

 years are now bearing in the West the load of administration of the National 

 Forests. These men have been too busy with their own jobs to have had much 

 to say about other things, but they have been piling up experience, and now, 

 with their work reasonably well in hand, they see clearly what it is going 

 to be like and have ideas of their own as to the kind of men they want to 

 help them in it. For them many illusions have been dispelled. The work has 

 l)een different far from what they thought it when they left their studies. 

 The.se they have had to forget mainly while they devoted themselves with all 

 the force there was in them to meeting certain big, rough, insistent conditions 

 and facts. The scientific principles which they were taught in college are not 

 indeed lost, but for the present they are in large measure thrust into the 

 background of their minds. The day's work meanwhile is nine-tenths plain, 

 straight administration — protection, development, surveys, business dealings 

 with a variety of people, in circumstances not guaranteed to be either easy 

 or pleasant, for the glamor of frontier life has mainly passed away. 



Now these men looking out from their own experience toward future 

 helpers and successors, do not despise college education or technical training; 

 in the plans of the Service they do not fail to recognize the necessity of 

 exact scientific study of the elements with which they deal ; least of all do 

 they undervalue a grasp of and loyalty to the big, simple, underlying principles 

 of forestry. But they do see that proper balance among interests has to be 

 maintained, and that to them means that for a long time to come the scientific 

 aspects of the work, as far as time, exi)enditure and numbers of men are con- 

 cerned, must take a secondary place. If anything were needed to show the 

 soundness of this position, last year's fires in Idaho and Montana ought cer- 

 tainly to serve. 



To those responsible for the forest schools these men would say that 

 while they expect always to welcome a considerable number of highlv trained 



