298 ' JOURNAL OF FORIvSTRY 



The purchasing of forest land, the employment of foresters and for- 

 est rangers, and the creation of forests, even if executed in a most 

 satisfactory and business-like manner, should not be regarded as ulti- 

 mate objectives in forestry, for they are only administrative prerequi- 

 sites to the real operative procedures, which form the proper basis for 

 judging the degree of success of a forest business. 



How to handle a forest property successfully is surely a problem of 

 major magnitude. The modus operandi of a forest business, especially 

 during its formative period, should be largely determined by local trials 

 and experiments. Passive acceptance of the opinions and judgments 

 of even the most eminent native or foreign authorities may ultimately 

 hinder rather than help. Idle acquiescence not only deadens creative 

 thought, but may be misleading, in that the particular point of view is 

 based upon remote, often foreign, practice, of which little except the 

 fundamental principles is applicable. Cotta,- generally regarded as the 

 most prudent and scientific of the fathers of European forestry, wrote 

 that "things look very differently in the forest from what they do in 

 books. . . . Many entirely one-sided points of view are copied by 

 the merely literary forester so often that they finally stand as articles 

 of faith which nobody dares question, no matter how one-sided or 

 erroneous they may be." It is the writer's belief that we will do well 

 in projecting our forestal procedures on the basis of local experiences, 

 for the more local the experiences are the more specific the resultant 

 prescriptions may be. This point of view is again supported by Cotta. 

 who in 1817 wrote: "What many declare good or bad, proves good or 

 bad only in certain localities." What holds for practically the entire 

 subject of forestry Toumey' emphasizes, particularly in the field of 

 seeding and planting. He writes that "although the fundamental prin- 

 ciples underlying reforestation by seeding and planting are the same 

 everywhere, local conditions so profoundly affect their application that 

 the forester must work out their manner of use for each locality sepa- 

 rately." 



Guided by this fundamental and tenable premise and not by a selfish 

 motive, the foresters of Pennsylvania have set up within and about 

 the 53 State forests a large number of experiments, covering a wide 

 range of subjects. Some of these experiments are original in their 

 conception, while many follow beaten paths. A large number are al- 

 ready beginning to show instructive and suggestive results, and T ven- 



' Cotta, Heinrich : Ainccisiiinj zuiii W'aldhau. preface. 

 ^ Toumey. James W. : Seeding and Planting-, page xxxii. 



