398 Forestry Quarterly 



soil for the production of crops; both are arts born of necessity; 

 both developed along applied lines long before the value of purely 

 scientific investigation was felt; and today both are being put 

 upon a firmer foundation by the scientific development of their 

 botanical phases. 



The agricultural man has for ages stumbled upon many impor- 

 tant facts and principles that the botanist has later explained, 

 thereby making more scientific farming possible. Many agricul- 

 tural phenomena have been seen by the farmer but not understood 

 until theoretical botanists explained them. In exactly the same 

 way foresters for centuries have based forestry practice upon cer- 

 tain biological facts and principles whose underlying causes they 

 did not understand until the scientific forester worked them out 

 experimentally. 



It is an interesting fact that plant ecology also developed along 

 applied lines long before the value of purely scientific investigation 

 was felt. Furthermore, plant ecology first was applied in the 

 woods where it found working material — par excellence — and where 

 it found a wide sphere of practical utility. In other words, applied 

 plant ecology developed in silvicultural practice long before scien- 

 tific plant ecology made its appearance. 



While forest ecology as a science is distinctly modern, many 

 phases of it, as I have intimated above, have been known to prac- 

 tising foresters for a long time. In fact, botanists and foresters, 

 note especially the latter, have studied forest ecology for over 100 

 years in an unsystematic, empirical way; but only within the last 

 50 years has the science been systematically developed as a branch 

 of forestry. Many observations which were strictly ecological in 

 nature can be traced back more than one hundred years. For 

 example, as early as 1683 certain foresters in Germany recognized 

 the fact that all sites are not suited to all species of trees and that 

 conifers usually occupied the poorer sites. By this observation 

 foresters very early learned to adapt their planting material to the 

 site. Long before 1800 foresters abroad used volume tables and 

 yield tables based upon different site classes. In these very tables 

 they had a deal of forest ecology crystallized. They were also 

 familiar with the process of natural selection as it worked out in the 

 woods many years before Darwin's Origin oj Species. They under- 

 stood the practical workings of many other laws of tree societies as 

 they affected silvicultural management, even though they did not 



