An Appreciation of Dr. Schenck 563 



was better fitted than Dr. Schenck to develop its possibilities or 

 more competent to play it up. 



Many interesting lessons might be drawn from the history 

 of the Pisgah Forest, which history, as a private owner's attempt 

 at forestry, has just now closed. Among them is one too im- 

 portant not to mention in passing. The writer in the spring of 

 1900 made a break in his own work in the Maine woods by 

 paying a visit to this contrasting field. With all his admirable 

 adaptability, Dr. Schenck was in many ways a high-class German 

 still. This was shown particularly in his treatment of labor. 

 Any man in the Maine woods who would talk to woodsmen 

 as Dr. Schenck did would get his head cracked on the spot. 

 North Carolinians took it differently ; they laid low, and took 

 out their grudge with a fire later on. The lesson that forest 

 managers must make allowance for the rights, interests and 

 feelings of local populations is one not likely to be too strongly 

 taken to heart. 



Dr. Schenck's experience on the estate, his acquaintance all 

 over the country gained through forestry meetings, and his con- 

 sulting work seem gradually to have liberalized his views. That 

 liberalizing process further developed after he severed his con- 

 nection with the estate, and ran his school peripatetically, and 

 was completed seemingly under the stimulus of contact with the 

 lumber industry in the Pacific Northwest. His admiration for 

 Northwestern lumbermen, their ingenuity, force and daring, 

 hardly knew bounds. Through this contact, apparently, he filled 

 out his sympathy with the lumbering industry. 



It was a marvelous thing for a man to do — to come over here 

 from that country in all the world where the individual is most 

 restricted, and where the most intensive forest management any- 

 where in force is fortified by a century of science, of popular 

 training, of established practice of the art — with this background 

 behind him to sense the contrasting conditions of a much newer 

 country, and sympathize with our lumbering industry in its 

 present form ; but that Dr. Schenck did. It is not to be wondered 

 at that in his reaction he went somewhat to extremes. Some such 

 strong reaction as his to balance opposite tendencies in the for- 

 estry profession of the day, in fact, was needed. 



At the bottom of Dr. Schenck's teaching there seem to have 



