564 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



the district offices, so that an administrative officer can easily make 

 good without it. There seems to be Httle incentive for iniative. 



While the writer does not desire to criticize the Service for what 

 some technical men consider a woeful lack of efifort toward the estab- 

 lishment of working plans, and while the question of finances may offer 

 a partial excuse in this matter, it does seem that at least some progress 

 along this line might have been possible, even if no more had been done 

 than to establish one single unit under a working plan in each district 

 as an experiment and a demonstration area. While it is true that there 

 have been some few non-technical men of marked ability, is it not true 

 that these men had the assistance and advice of the technical men and 

 the good sense to use it ? They were temperamentally fit. On the other 

 hand, may not the lack of progress along the line of forest management 

 on the sustained-yield basis be due largely ( i ) to the fact that so many 

 of the supervisors were non-technical men, and (2) that realizing this 

 the central-office men felt the responsibility of a rather close direction 

 of the field-work, and (3) that as a result of (2) the detailed central- 

 office supervision of small local matters has become an established 

 system. 



If these things are true, will they not go a long way toward explain- 

 ing why so many non-technical men have been able to make good, as 

 well as that these men are at least indirectly responsible for the lack of 

 progress in the development of scientific forestry? All of these are 

 influencing conditions which Kneipp seems not to have considered. 



