FORESTRY 1N BRITAIN. Te 
is to teach and to study our subject from a wider platform than 
that of the mere details of individual form, and to eacourage our 
pupils to study plant-life not merely in water-cultures in the 
laboratory, but in the broader aspects exhibited in the competitive 
field of nature. " 
If forestry is ever to thrive in Britain, botanists must lay the 
foundation for it in this way. We cannot expect to make our 
pupils foresters, nor can they yet get the practical instruction 
they require in Britain. In this we must depend yet a while on 
Continental schools ; the stream of Continental migration, which 
needs no longer to flow in morphological and physiological 
channels, must now turn in the direction of forest-schools. But 
we can so mould their studies and give bias to their work as will 
put them on the track of this practical subject. If we had only 
a few men so trained as competent foresters, and capable of teach- 
ing forestry, there would be an efficient corps with which to carry 
on the crusade against ignorance and indifference, the overcoming 
of which will be the prelude to the organisation of forestry 
schools aad scientific sylvicalture in Britain. The influence of 
the individual couats for much in a case like this. The advent 
of a capable man started forestry teaching in Scotland, which 
years of talk had not succeeded in doing. And so it will be 
elsewhere. 
I have endeavoured, thus briefly, to sketch the position, the 
needs, and the prospects of forestry in Britain. Its vast import- 
ance as a national question must sooner or later be recognised. 
It is a subject of growing interest. Its elements are complex, 
and it touches large social problems; bub the whole question 
ultimately resolves itself into one of the application of science. 
To botanists we must look in the first instance for the pro- 
pagation of the scientific knowledge upon which this large industry 
must rest. They must be the apostles of forestry. And forestry 
in turn will react upon their treatment of botany. Botany can- 
not thrive in a purely introspective atmosphere. It can only 
live by keeping ia touch with the national life, and the path by 
which it may at the present time best do this is that offered 
by forestry. 
