VOLUME TABLES AND THE BASES ON WHICH 

 THEY MAY BE BUILT. 



Ever since the sustained annual yield became a factor in forest 

 management ever}- method of reducing the labor involved in 

 taking an inventory of the stock on hand has been welcomed by 

 the forest manager. One of the greatest of these labor savers is 

 the volume table by means of which it is possible, with a mini- 

 mum of measurement and calculation, to obtain the cubic content 

 of a stand in a very satisfactory manner. 



The first suggestion of the volume table was that of Cotta in 

 his " Systematische Anleitung zur Taxation der Waldungen," 

 published in 1804. Forest mensuration, like all other branches 

 of forestry in the early decades of the nineteenth century, suffered 

 from a lack of exact investigation, and Cotta' s splendid idea was 

 first developed on a scale large enough to be of practical value 

 when the Bavarian government, in 1846, instituted a very ex- 

 tended .study in the form and content of the stems of the more 

 important forest trees of that country. 



The volume tables which resulted from this study, which in- 

 volved a complete analytical measurement of over forty thousand 

 trees, were based on Cotta's idea that on the average, where con- 

 siderable numbers were involved, trees of the same diameter and 

 height contained equal volumes of wood. These tables were later 

 translated from the old Bavarian foot and inch measure into the 

 metric sy.stem by Ganghofer. Ganghofer also improved the op- 

 portunity to introduce age classes as a third basic factor in his 

 classification. 



The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a very great 

 activity in research along forest mensuration lines, the greater 

 part of which was directed towards the improvement and exten- 

 sion of the volume tables. With .some minor exceptions, the 

 work followed closely the lines of the Bavarian tables as improved 

 by Ganghofer, and with the exception of the last decade, no 

 original ideas of nny great value were developed. 



The preparation of tables that are to be of wide applica- 

 tion and permanent value involves the measurement of a very 

 large number of trees selected from various localities and, as 



