New View Points in Silviculture. 217 



viations from the type caused by changes in environment. The 

 deviations from the type are of accidental nature and therefore 

 are not permanent. For this reason, the question of the source 

 of seed, in his opinion, has no significance whatever for the for- 

 ester. No matter where or from what trees the seed is collected 

 the progeny resulting from the seed, irrespective of its origin, 

 will possess only the characteristics which are typical for the 

 species as a whole. 



Mayr is doubtless right when he denies the possibility of trans- 

 mitting qualities which are the result of soil conditions or silvi- 

 cultural treatment, but this is about as far as one can go with 

 him. There are characteristics which are the result of climatic 

 conditions and yet are retained and transmitted through inherit- 

 ance. For instance, the Scotch Pine in the Baltic provinces in- 

 variably has straighter trunks and yields wood of higher quality 

 than the Scotch Pine of central Germany. 



Vilmorin in the twenties and thirties of the last century experi- 

 mented with growing Scotch Pine from German, French and 

 Russian seed. The pine of the Baltic provinces differed from the 

 rest in that it had a straight, cylindrical, well developed trunk; 

 and the seed from the plantations of the Riga variety produced 

 a progeny possessing the same good qualities as the first gener- 

 ation. 



Von Sievers in the fifties of the last century made similar ex- 

 periments in some of the Baltic provinces. The pines grown 

 from seed collected in Darmstadt did not possess such straight 

 trunks as the pines from the native seed. The same experiments 

 were repeated by several investigators and with the same results. 



Cieslar in Austria and Engler in Switzerland have both dem- 

 onstrated the importance of the source of seed upon the character 

 of the plantation. Seed was collected from trees of different 

 species grown in the valleys and in the mountains and were sown 

 under identical climatic and soil conditions, in order to determine 

 whether the characteristics of the mother trees will be retained 

 in the plantations made under exactly the same conditions. It 

 was found that the spruce of the mountains, which grows slower 

 than the spruce of the valleys, retains this characteristic when 

 planted in the valleys and vice versa; other characteristics such 

 as the length of the vegetative activity were found to be also re- 

 tained. Engler, on the basis of his experiments, came to the 



