386 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



organize and coordinate the forces which might help them to put 

 forestry before the pubHc, than have blundered in calculating yield, 

 or estimating damages, or prescribing silvicultural treatment of a 

 woodlot? I believe that most men will agree that this is so, and that 

 it accounts in some measure at least for such recent slowing down 

 of forestry progress as has taken place. 



Now ivhy is this so ? It is not because administration or propaganda 

 work takes any higher type of mind, or any greater application, or 

 any finer personality. The administrator, the propagandist, and the 

 scientist were moulded of the same clay, and barring exceptional 

 cases as one must, the administrator (or public educator) might have 

 become a scientist, and vice versa, under proper training. Under 

 proper training and under early enough training. That is the answer, 

 in my humble judgment. The training which is being given in our 

 forest schools, graduate as well as undergraduate, has been such that 

 we have turned out men capable of painstaking scientific research and 

 nne-spun theorizing, far oftener than we have men of business train- 

 ing, administrative capacity, and the power to mould human opinion. 

 European forestry might absorb such an output, for Europe has 

 accepted forestry for these three hundred years, and has had leisure 

 to go into matters beyond the fundamentals of public education, fire 

 protection, conservative lumbering, etc. But America can not absorb 

 it. We do not have the work for such men to do ; on the contrary 

 we have a great deal of work for which they have not been trained. 

 That is why the so-called practical men are holding their own as 

 forest supervisors and administrative officers all along the line in 

 the Forest Service, for example, while some of the technical men who 

 were found to be round pegs in the square holes of administrative 

 positions have been side-tracked into positions elsewhere, ingeniously 

 created for them by apprehensive superiors. (Some of the latter, 

 given work of a technical character, and requiring no less ability, 

 though of a different kind, have on the other hand retrieved earlier 

 failures and made some of the most valued men of the profession 

 today.) That is why three or four of the State forestry departments 

 have made no mean records under the direction of men without pro- 

 fessional forestry training. 



Some men, particularly those who have not been to the forest schools 

 themselves, have been quick to interpet this situation as an indictment 

 of all technical training ,and have rather taken the position that tech- 



