THE TECHNICAL FORESTER 161 



The technical man who makes himself the master of these major 

 lines of work, supplemented by numerous unnamed activities of minor 

 character, has an assured future in the higher ranks of the Forest 

 Service and may aspire to any position in the organization up to and 

 including that of the Forester. The man who cannot master these 

 various details, many of which are foreign to the practice of scientific 

 forestry, must necessarily content himself with a comparatively sub- 

 ordinate position or with highly specialized technical work. Roughly, 

 the Service activities divide into two classes — one, the administrative 

 work, which to a greater or less extent necessitates a more or less 

 complete mastery of all the activities enumerated herein ; and the other, 

 specialized work in some feature of true forest management. The man 

 of technical training who is now in the Service probably will always 

 be able to find some niche which he can satisfactorily fill, but he will 

 not be able to realize his highest ambitions unless he squares with the 

 specifications laid down herein. 



Comment may be made here upon one manifest weakness of the 

 average professional forester. One would logically assume that the 

 practice of forestry would be in the woods where the timber grows, 

 or in mills where the timber is manufactured into raw materials, or in 

 the shops where it is manufactured into finished products. In the first 

 two instances the practice of the profession must necessarily be under 

 rather primitive and not wholly comfortable conditions. It manifestly 

 is impossible for every trained forester to be a swivel-chair forester, 

 with headquarters in a main town and an itinerary including all of the 

 best hotels in the region. To the contrary, a great many men must 

 find their field in the woods, with headquarters at logging camps, or 

 in the mills with headquarters in the small towns. These are the places 

 where the forester of the future is going to win his recognition and 

 establish the reputation of his profession. Too much of the practice 

 of the profession has been detached from trees and sawmills and lias 

 been concentrated on blue prints, typewritten reports, and ])rinted 

 bulletins. 



The above fact is impressing itself with increasing strength upon 

 the officials of the Forest Service and is becoming an acute problem in 

 the handling of the technically trained men. The places where their 

 services are needed are of the kinds above described ; the places where 

 they wish to work are the places where modern comforts and con- 

 veniences are readily obtained. This latter inclination probably is due 

 to the fact that manv of the men are married to women of culture and 



