FOREST BIOLOGY 213 



rate of losses in feet, board measure., etc., must be explained to him 

 in his own language. In that way, perhaps, there is hope of getting 

 action. Whether he knows it or not, the specialist is out of his field 

 when it comes to woods work. It is the forester's field. The forester 

 begins where the specialist leaves off; he must be the mordant between 

 the purely "scientific" and the purely "practical." The "practical" 

 man, as shown by experience in a hundred lines of work, cannot 

 utilize the production of the "scientist" directly. Usually he cannot 

 even understand the language in which the technical man must write. 

 There must always be a go-between — some one sufficiently technical 

 to understand and be able to use and criticise and experiment with 

 the purely technical and work it over into practicability, or, if the 

 technical is already practicable, to prove it in the field and introduce 

 the new idea in such a way as to get something done. Until very re- 

 cently, there have been so few foresters available that no one has 

 gotten very far with actual control work. 



Another potent reason for this condition lies in the fact that the 

 bulk of our foresters have, so far, been covered up with administrative 

 and executive work and with the simpler forest investigations re- 

 quired by the work at hand. Still another reason may lie in the fact 

 that it is only within, say, five years, that American foresters in 

 general have waked up to what they have on their hands in the way 

 of pests and diseases. That we are arriving is principally due to the 

 rapidity with which our forests are being covered by surveys. For 

 the first time we can form a notion of what we have and the condition 

 that it is in. 



Still another reason may well be mentioned. The bulk of our 

 foresters in high administrative positions were early graduates from 

 the forestry schools or had no technical education. The early schools 

 taught but little concerning forest biology because there was but little 

 known about the biological status of our forests — and because the 

 early student could not be persuaded that such fancy stuff was of 

 any considerable importance. More or less this difficulty still per- 

 sists, owing to the difficulty of the students appreciating the necessity 

 of grounding in the essentials before taking up the purely forest 

 aspects of the several sciences involved, and, perhaps also, the in- 

 structors have not always acquired the point of view of the forester. 



In a medical school it is unlikely that bacteriology will be 

 taught by an instructor without a degree in medicine or in a school 



