38 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



are gradually covering up the fertile, arable land below. The 

 hillsides are still grazed over by numbers of goats and sheep 

 who, in their search for such sustenance as the area provides, 

 trample down what little growth exists and aid in the denudation 

 work going on. The orders of the forest officer are to replant 

 the area, an area known to have been covered with a fine forest 

 a century or two ago. It is heart-breaking work, and requires a 

 high skill combined with higher training to produce results in 

 such places. And yet they have been produced, and that in 

 spite of the assertions on all sides that no trees would ever grow 

 there. I do not know that the forester is more optimistic than 

 men in other avocations, but it requires a good deal of evidence 

 combined with practical demonstration to convince the 

 experienced, tried, practical forester that trees of some sort will 

 not grow in any given locality below that of the permanent snow- 

 line. The particular species tried time and again may not 

 succeed, but others doubtless will. 



These practical illustrations from a forest officer's life have 

 been given with a purpose. They serve to show, I think, the 

 nature of the training the forester requires if he is to be able to 

 efficiently carry on his multifarious duties, and at the same time 

 satisfy himself that the woods under his charge are, each one of 

 them, getting exactly the treatment they require from year to 

 year. They also emphasise the fact that the forester is learning 

 all his life, that there is something for him to observe, some 

 little secret of nature for him to pick up, every time he goes out 

 into the woods. It follows, therefore, that it is never too late to 

 improve one's education as a forester. That though one may 

 have begun by only following a part of a course in forestry, only 

 have taken the more simple and elementary branches, that it is 

 always possible to go back from the woods to the classroom. 

 The absence in the woods has not brought forgetfulness of what 

 we learnt at our former course. Rather has it brought an 

 increased power to assimilate the higher branches of the science 

 of forestry. So many things explained in the classroom, we 

 shall remember to have noted out in the woods as requiring 

 explanation. Therefore, I would say to'the student commencing 

 his forestry course, take every advantage of what you are told 

 in the lecture room, observe all you can in the woods when 

 taken there for practical work, for in the future you will be able 

 to turn this practical knowledge to use ; even the very existence 



