174 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



State organization or of a forest school faculty the sum total of effort 

 seems far too small. 



Each State has its local problems, many of which it should expect 

 to solve for itself. Has only one State problems of sufficient im- 

 portance to justify the maintenance of an experiment station? The 

 well-equipped investigator of the future and even of the present must 

 be trained far beyond the requirements of the practitioner. For men 

 so trained all forest organizations must look to the forest schools. 

 Several European countries depend entirely upon the faculties of their 

 forest schools for research. Through the establishment of research 

 organizations the Federal Government and the States have in part 

 relieved the schools of the United States of this burden. But we of 

 the profession still look to them for inspiration and ideals in research 

 as we have in many other things, and for results as well to aid in the 

 full development of forest practice. 



Although many and important results have been secured during 

 the last thirty years, and particularly the last ten, the field yet to be 

 covered is larger than it appeared at the beginning. Our work to the 

 present, preliminary in many respects though it may be, has opened 

 vistas for future work of which originally we did not dream. There 

 is hardly a line of work or a region for which one familiar with the 

 problems can not with a few minutes' thought outline important 

 research requiring years to complete. The demand for exact informa- 

 tion along many lines will be upon us long before it is ready. It would 

 be far better if the information could be ready in advance of actual 

 demand so that we could direct economic developments into the best 

 channels. The field is enormous. The- efforts of all organizations 

 engaged upon forest investigations, under the best conditions of 

 coordination and cooperation, will fall far short of actual needs. At 

 the present, however, there is no correlation and practically no coopera- 

 tion. So far as I know, the Forest Service is the only organization 

 which goes so far as to issue a list of the investigative projects upon 

 which it is engaged. Except incidentally, we in the Forest Service do 

 not know what investigative work is being conducted by other agencies 

 and only incidentally can any other agency learn what is being done 

 by other forest schools or by other States. 



How by any one activity can the Society of American Foresters 

 better fulfill one of the main purposes of its existence than by bringing 



