IS BRITISH FORESTRY PROGRESSIVE 4 45 
But unfortunately for the realisation of such expectations, 
many factors operate upon British forestry which cannot be 
allowed for in any abstract reasoning or theorising upon the 
subject. In the first place, British woods have no distinct 
individuality. They are not represented by so many thousands 
of acres devoted to the production of timber, but are part and 
parcel of so many separate estates, of which they form by no 
means the most important part. They possess a relative rather 
than an absolute value, and the purpose they serve in estate 
economy is merely a subordinate one. In the second place, they 
are in the hands of private owners, and their condition and treat- 
ment are determined, not by the merits of a particular sylvicultural 
system, but by the individual tastes, interests, and objects of their 
respective owners. To clearly understand the effect of these 
several existing conditions, one must have filled the position of 
forester on a private estate, as no outsider, howevg intimate his 
acquaintance with the subject of forestry in general, can have 
anything but a faint idea of the numerous influences which are 
continually at work upon an estate. 
It may be possible, however, to give a faint idea of what I 
mean by glancing at the influence an estate owner exercises on 
his woods in his threefold capacity of individual, property or land- 
owner, and the head of a noble family. As an individual, his 
inclinations may run in the direction of sport, arboriculture, or 
landscape effect, and according as one or other of these inclina- 
tions preponderates, so will he wish his woods treated. As a 
landowner, the return he derives from his property is what chiefly 
concerns him; and a present rent of two or three shillings per 
acre is of more value to him personally than a prospective one of 
three or four times that amount in sixty.or eighty years time. 
As the head of the house, tradition and sentiment enter largely 
into his actions, and any wide departure from the course adopted 
by his predecessors is not readily taken. The proprietor of a fine 
old family estate has a natural repugnance to treat his woods ag 
a financial concern, and to consider them as so many cubic feet 
of timber to be disposed of at a certain period in their growth. 
They have been before his eyes as long as his memory can go 
back, and it is only natural that he should wish to hand them 
over to his successors with their most distinctive features still 
unimpaired, 
The above are only a few of the numerous obstacles to the 
