556 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



chose for his title "The Technical Forester in National Forest Admin- 

 istration." The adjective qualifying the forester is wholly superfluous. 

 Do we speak of the technical engineer, the technical lawyer, or the 

 technical physician ? Of course not ; for the fact that a man is a phy- 

 sician implies that he is qualified to practice medicine, and that conse- 

 quently he has had the necessary training to that end. A forester, as 

 commonly understood in this country, is one who is qualified to practice 

 forestry, and it is taken for granted that he has acquired the necessary 

 technical knowledge for the practice of his profession. Let us do away, 

 then, with the term "technical" forester, for a man is either a forester 

 or not a forester, a district forester or merely an executive officer for 

 a district. 



We are also inclined to take a narrow point of view as to the way in 

 which a knowledge of forestry may be acquired and to think of the 

 forester as the product of the forest school only. This is misleading. 

 There are excellent civil and mechanical engineers whose only training 

 has been in field or shop, and it is not difficult to call to mind many 

 rangers and supervisors who are good foresters in spite of the fact that 

 they have never set foot inside the lecture-room. To my mind, there 

 is no better forester than the ranger who has acquired the science and 

 art of forestry through close observation in the woods, through intelli- 

 gent study at his own headquarters, through an understanding of the 

 social conditions in his neighborhood, and, above all, through constant 

 dreaming as to how his knowledge may be applied, so that after many 

 years his own hills may support an ideal forest and an ideal range, and 

 that these and all their other resources may minister to a better social 

 organism. 



The forest-school graduate who is devoid of imagination is no for- 

 ester at all ; the ranger who dreams of trees growing as thick as hairs 

 on a dog's back and who applies this vision to his every-day work is 

 one of the profession. 



Mr. Kneipp believes that "idealism has its proper place in National 

 Forest administration, but its importance should not be unduly magni- 

 fied." I do not believe it possible unduly to magnify its importance. 

 Idealism is the essence of forestry. We are not delving into the ground 

 for coal or oil, the supplies of which we shall some day exhaust. We 

 are engaged in a great constructive task, the building up of forest re- 

 sources, with the object of assuring an everlasting supply for the com- 

 mon good. Our field is new and untried and our methods nothing more 

 than experiments. Without ideals constantly kept in mind the forester 

 would soon slip down to the level of a clerk, his thoughts muddled with 



