674 JOURNAI, OF FORESTRY 



Forest Service is concerned, is very questionable, and conversely the 

 future development of the National Forest along scientific lines de- 

 pends upon the attitude of the schools. 



Professor Tourney asks for statistics, and so I have gone back to the 

 records of District 5 and have taken January, 1909, because that was 

 soon after the district had been established; January, 1913, four years 

 later, and January, 1917, another four-year interval, which brings us to 

 what was the normal pre-war conditions. A record now would be con- 

 siderably different, showing a marked decrease in forest assistants and 

 examiners. In fact, there are only five left out of the eleven of a year 

 ago, and one forest-school supervisor has resigned and one has gone to 

 war. It is a decrease which will not be made up for years, because the 

 supply has now been practically stopped at its source by student enlist- 

 ments from the different colleges. 



The first two columns seem to bear out Toumey's and Spring's con- 

 tention as to the value of forest-school men in administrative positions 

 and warrant their optimism. But the next two columns show that 

 forest-school deputies have disappeared entirely, leaving only a reserve 

 of non-technical men to draw upon to fill the future vacancies in super- 

 visor positions. This is apparently assuring a return of the non- 

 technical man in those places if the ordinary procedure in choosing 

 supervisors from the ranks of deputies is followed. But most serious 

 of all is the decline in number of the forest examiners and forest 

 assistants in the past four years. As already stated, the number, both 

 in the field and in the district offices, is much smaller since war was 

 declared. 



If the number of forest-school men does not at least remain perma- 

 nent, there may be several things wrong. The new forest-school grad- 

 uate may not receive from supervisors the proper handling to bring him 

 out and develop him ; or he may be the wrong type of man for natural 

 forest work ; or he may not have had the proper training to fit him for 

 such work ; or the trouble may be a combination of these things. No 

 one will deny that there is a need of trained and educated men in for- 

 estry as in other professions; so it cannot be that the Forest Service 

 deliberately chooses to ignore them. 



