450 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



on a firm scientific basis, and all further development should also 

 be based on scientific methods. Science is an exact and systematic 

 statement of knowledge concerning some subject or groui> of subjects. 

 The fundamentals of .science, then, are exactness and system, both 

 in research and in the arrangement and dissemination of knowledge. 

 Any systematic scheme of classification, to be 'highly utilitarian, must 

 be simple and yet comprehensive, practical in its application, capable 

 of further expansion as the demands upon it increase, and sufficiently 

 broad to cover the entire field of the profession. A scheme, to be 

 entirely comprehensive, must provide for all possible contigencies 

 which may arise in the future. Any compilation or classification system 

 should render information more accessible. 



Although no one forester may ever have use for the co rplete 

 outline, it is felt that it should be useful to the profession as a whole. 

 The major subjects are given a detailed expansion which, it is hoped, 

 will be commensurate with the needs of the specialist. The decimal 

 system of classification has been preserved throughout. The field of 

 forestry was divided into nine component parts of approximately 

 equal importance. All subdivisions also were, perforce, limited to 

 nine. This limitation, however, is no serious defect of the scheme 

 and was remedied by choosing broad, conprehensive major captions, 

 and in some cases by further amplifving the secondary subjects. While 

 practical utility and economy are the potent cliaracteristics of the 

 decimal system of classification, yet logic is of considerable importance, 

 since those who will use the scheme must know at least the main 

 branches, which are more easily remembered if they are logically 

 chosen. Likewise the writer was mindful of the principles of library 

 science and endeavored to formulate the scheme accordingly. This 

 system is equally applicable to the indexing and classifying of books 

 and pamphlets on the shelves of a library, cards in a catalogue, clip- 

 pings and notes in almost any form, and, in short, material in any 

 form which may be desired at some future date. 



Dewey^ claims the following advantages for the decimal system 

 of classification compared with any other system based on letters, 

 svmbols, numbers, or any combination of them : 



1. Less expensive. 



2. ]\Iore easily understood, remembered, and used. 



^ Dewey, Melvil, Decimal Classification and Relative Index, 795 pp, 1913. 



