1886.] EDITORIAL NOTES. 6G9 



tlieir cousins in the Dominion managed their affairs ; so that the 

 proposed school, in addition to training the numerous staff required 

 to superintend the vast forests which until now have been appa- 

 rently managed on somewhat haphazard principles, would throw the 

 enormous material around it open to the world, and provide " clinical " 

 instruction of the best and most varied kind to those who chose to 

 avail themselves of it. I myself do a good deal of planting in the 

 North, and have been anxious that my forester should be aljle to get 

 some sort of training which might lift him a little out of the groove 

 of rule-of-thumb tradition. But nothing of the kind is attainable at 

 present, although I have to acknowledge with gratitude the courtesy 

 with which the Hon. Mr. Bruce threw open the resources of the 

 admirably arranged Seafield forest. Wiiat we ought to have in each 

 of the three divisions of the kingdom is a school sufficiently well 

 equipped with professors, and lecture-rooms, and laboratories, to turn 

 out men fitted for regular official employment all over the world, 

 but giving at the same time short courses of theoretical and practical 

 instruction adapted to the wants of the forester who is to have a 

 few thousand acres under his charge. Colonel Pearson is of opinion 

 that two months would be sufficient for this purpose, and the only 

 real difficulty in the way is the condition of our woods, which, on 

 the somewhat oracular dictum of Professor Boppe, it is now the 

 fashion to condemn most unsparingly. But it seems to me that 

 conclusions have been drawn from that distinguished authority's 

 evidence which careful perusal does not confirm, for in fact he 

 admits that many of our forests, and more especially those in 

 Scotland, are excellently well managed. His great oljjections are — 

 first, that they are too young, but this is a rapidly mending fault, 

 and many of them have really reached that state of semi-maturity 

 which many good authorities, and notably the Germans, hold to 

 furnish the most productive time for cutting in the present state of 

 our markets, on the theory that we get the best value out of the 

 ground l)y two short crops rather than in one, which furnishes an 

 older class of tree for which there is now little demand. And, 

 second, his other grounds of dissent from the current method of 

 managing our woods are based almost exclusively on controversial 

 questions regarding the respective merits of natural and artificial 

 reproduction, and on, if I may venture to say so, some misappre- 

 hension of our local and climatic conditions. I therefore hold that 

 our woods are ample in size for teacliing purj^oses, that in many 

 cases the financial returns from them are as good as can be expected 

 in the present depressed state of the v/ood trade, and that alUwe 

 now require is the opportunity of giving our foresters some chance 

 of acquiring definite and scientific lines to guide them in the 



