THE RELATION OF RESEARCH IN FOREST PRODUCTS 

 TO FOREST ADMINISTRATION 



By Ovid M. Butler 

 Assistant Director, Forest Products Laboratory 



The aim of research in forest products is to determine the properties 

 of wood and with that knowledge, to promote through experiments 

 or otherwise the best utiUzation of forests and forest lands by the 

 industries and by the public. In the minds of many this research stands 

 in relation to forestry and that phase of forestry embracing work in 

 the woods as the nether pole. They continue to think of forest pro- 

 duction and forest utilization as two independent efforts, mutually 

 sufficient in themselves, and it is difficult to close that gap in the 

 general conception of forest administration. 



The forester in the woods marking timber, making growth determin- 

 ations or appraising stumpage is usually far removed from the com- 

 petitive markets in which his product is absorbed and from which his 

 stumpage in large measure derives its commercial value. This will 

 be increasingly true in the future owing to the growing distance be- 

 tween forest supply and lumber market. For this reason, even foresters 

 are quite naturally apt to underestimate the direct bearing on their own 

 practice of current and potential developments in the utilization end 

 of the industry. 



Research in forest products leads to specialization in the different 

 properties of wood and opens the way to utilization on the basis of the 

 relative values of these properties for different products and different 

 purposes. This specialization in wood properties and wood utilization 

 has not developed as rapidly as specialization in many other industrial 

 fields. Nevertheless it has made sufficient progress, especially in recent 

 years, to indicate quite clearly that our increasing fund of scientific 

 knowledge relative to the chemical, physical and mechanical properties 

 of wood is sooner or later going to exert a tremendous influence upon 

 market and forest utilization, upon stumpage and lumber values, and 

 both directly and indirectly upon forest practice. This whole move- 

 ment, in fact, is so intimately related to forest production that neither 

 research in forest products nor the practice of forestry in the field can 



275 



