258 ANNUAL REPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1915. 



Such an impression is undoubtedly strengthened when the . ac- 

 tivities of such an organization as the Forest Service are considered. 

 The placing under management of about 165,000,000 acres of forest 

 land has been an administrative problem of enormous magnitude. 

 The administration of this vast public property involves many large 

 industrial and economic questions, and aflfects intimately a number 

 of varied and important interests; the lumber industry, the grazing 

 industiy, water-power development, navigation, municipal water 

 supplies, agricultural settlement, mining development, and the rail- 

 roads. In launching this great public enterprise, undertaken in the 

 face of strong opposition, administrative activities appeared to 

 overshadow ■ research work. In this way doubtless many scientific 

 men have gained the impression that forestry has little to do with 

 science, which seeks for the causal relationship of things and for 

 the establishment of laws and principles; that forestry is rather a 

 patchwork of miscellaneous knowledge borrowed from other sciences 

 and assembled without particular system to help the practical ad- 

 ministrator of forest property. 



My endeavor in this paper will be to show that this impression 

 is erroneous. T^^iile it is true that forestry as an art, as an applied 

 science, utilizes results furnished by the natural and engineering 

 sciences; while it is also true that the forester's activities, particu- 

 larly during the pioneer period of establishing forest practice, may 

 be largely administrative in character, there is nevertheless a funda- 

 mental forest science which has a distinctive place. As with all 

 others, the science of forestry owes its distinctive character to its 

 correlation, from a certain point of view, of parts of certain other 

 sciences, such as mathematics, botany, entomology, civil engineering, 

 and chemistr3^ But these are onh^ auxiliary to the resultant sci- 

 ence — forestry — which rests upon a knowledge of the life of the 

 forest as such, and which, therefore, depends upon the discovery 

 of laws governing the forest's growth and development. 



It is in this field chiefly that foresters may claim some scientific 

 achievement, some contribution to general science. Sciences do not 

 develop out of curiosity; they appear first of all because there are 

 practical problems that need to be solved, and only later become an 

 aim in themselves. This has been equally true of the science of 

 forestry. The object of forestry as an art is to produce timber of 

 high technical quality. In pursuing this object the forester very 

 early observed that tall, cylindrical timber, comparatively free of 

 knots, is produced only in dense stands, in forests in which the trees 

 exert an influence upon each other as well as upon the soil and cli- 

 mate of the area occupied by them. He further discovered that the 

 social environment produced by trees in a forest is an absolutely 

 essential condition for the continuous natural existence of the forest 



