Forestry and Science 377 



Fundamental work has come to include such problems as the 

 intricate relationship between the plant and its environment. The 

 causes of forest types lie at the root of silviculture ; to know how 

 to treat a piece of forest, or to plant a denuded area, we must 

 know all the factors influencing the forest or the plantation. So 

 far all efforts along this line have been purely empirical or based 

 on guesswork. It cannot be otherwise until we have determined 

 what are the factors affecting plant life, and what is the response 

 of the plant to each factor and to the various complexes or com- 

 binations of factors. This involves, among other things, the 

 quantitative measurement by delicate instruments of the response 

 of the various plant functions to carefully measured, or some- 

 times controlled, external conditions. Whether trees or herbaceous 

 plants are studied is immaterial to the larger problem, though 

 herbaceous plants offer more promise of evolving fundamental 

 laws which will apply equally well to trees. This work requires 

 a far higher training than that ordinarily received by the forester; 

 it requires thorough grounding in physics, in chemistry, in plant 

 physiology and in other sciences, combined with skill in instru- 

 mentation, facility in absorbing vast quantities of literature in 

 foreign languages, as well as a special type of mental ability. It 

 means the hardest kind of work, generally with no popular recog- 

 nition, because most of the results are but inconspicuous facts in 

 the foundation of knowledge. It is seldom that investigators are 

 able to bring out brilliant and startling pieces of work. But this 

 very lack of recognition is fortunate in tending to exclude from 

 such work all but those possessing the peculiar qualifications, 

 chief among which is an inborn love of knowledge for its own 

 sake. 



Many will say that this class of work is beyond the scope of 

 forestry, that it is work for the meteorologist, the ecologist and 

 the plant physiologist. True it is that most of the work which 

 is building the foundations for forestry, such as the work of 

 Shantz, of Livingston and of Cowles, is being done by men who 

 are not foresters, and, what is more humiliating, whose names 

 are scarcely known to the body of foresters at large. This situa- 

 tion, far from being an argument against foresters undertaking 

 investigations of this character, is the strongest reason for their 

 doing just such research. For, unless forestry can contribute its 



