646 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



all question of a doubt that the forest schools should offer the students 

 opportunity for as thorough specialization in all of these subjects as in 

 silviculture and management. Even a superficial survey of the work 

 forest-school graduates are now engaged in shows that in a great many 

 instances silviculture is only of secondary importance. I would not, 

 however, wish the reader to infer that a general knowledge of silvicul- 

 ture, or any of the other fundamental forestry subjects, is unnecessary 

 in any one of the fields enumerated above. Let me illustrate this point 

 by just one of many examples that might be given. The work in timber 

 testing at first thought seems quite remote from silviculture. Yet the 

 Forest Service has been considering a project in which it is being shown 

 that strength values in wood are related to the silvicultural conditions 

 under which the timber was grown. It is a simple matter to teach a 

 person to run a testing machine, but it is an entirely dififerent matter to 

 have him understand all the possible influencing conditions that may 

 afiFect his final results. Scientific work often has little value, and cer- 

 tainly cannot extend its influence as far as it should, unless all influenc- 

 ing conditions are taken into consideration. 



There are those who believe that much of the work outlined above 

 as belonging to the field of the forest school should rightly be developed 

 by other than the forestry departments of the university. With all due 

 respect to the persons not educated in forest schools successfully en- 

 gaged in these fields, either in the Service or out of it, we must admit 

 that the botany and chemistry departments and engineering schools that 

 tried to enter them have largely, and sometimes grossly, failed in their 

 efforts. A number of books now on the market on subjects relating to 

 forestry by engineers and others show quite distinctly their lack of 

 ability to handle these subjects. In his most excellent article, "The 

 Place of Forestry among the Natural Sciences," ^ Forester Graves has 

 pointed out that in the field in which forestry and botany overlap the 

 botanist has not yet reached a point where foresters can leave wholly 

 to botanists the working out of the basic facts about the plant life of 

 the forests which are needed in the practice of forestry. In the same 

 article Mr. Graves says: "If in the field of botany the forester has con- 

 tributed to the progress of botanical geography, and in the realm of 

 meteorology he has opened up new fields of investigation, his influence 

 in wood technology has been in changing entirely the attitude of engi- 

 neers, physicists, and chemists in the handling of wood products." 



The reason engineers, physicists, and chemists had to depend upon 



" Graves : The Place of Forestry among the Natural Sciences. Science, Vol. 

 XU, p. 117. 



