LIBRARY 

 NEW YORK 



FORESTRY QUARTERLY B °™«- 



Vol. VII] December, 1909. [No. 4. 



WHY AMERICAN FORESTERS ARE POORLY TRAINED. 

 By A Professor. 



Every new calling which aspires to the dignity of a profession 

 must pass through a stage of militant propaganda to obtain a 

 footing among the old established professions. Some prove their 

 worth and take their proper place; others fail and remain in the 

 class of trades. Law, medicine and the ministry were formerly 

 looked upon as the professions. It was only after a bitter struggle 

 that the engineer and chemist obtained recognition. The forester 

 is now knocking at the door for admission. Is he to be a profes- 

 sional man or a tradesman? 



The situation in the case of the forester is unique in our his- 

 tory. It is not the struggle of a new profession for recognition 

 in the world of science, but the struggle of a profession already 

 old in Europe for a recognized footing in the United States and 

 Canada. The question is are we doing our best to obtain that 

 footing ? 



If a calling is to take rank as a profession it must require some 

 training other than skilled labor, and peculiar to itself. So long 

 as men of another vocation can enter the field of forestry without 

 any special training and do successfully the work which is de- 

 manded of them there is no distinct profession of forestry and 

 the forester's proper standing has not been attained. 



According to these premises the forester in this country is 

 undoubtedly without footing as a professional man. Men of all 

 professions and many trades dabble in the planting of parks, the 

 planting of windbreaks, or the patching up of decayed trees and 

 pass current as foresters. The thoroughly trained forester, the 

 botanist who has studied the life history of a single tree, the 

 lawyer who has studied up the forest laws, the engineer who has 



