24 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY, 
5. Training in Sylviculture.! 
By R. C. Munro Fercuson, M.P. 
The outlook for British sylviculture has been dreary enough, 
both as regards private mismanagement, administration, inaction, 
and public ignorance. Such public interest as is exhibited in 
tree-culture is so much crackling of thorns under the pot, for 
it amounts to little else than amiable projects for turning un- 
employables into foresters, the public having conceived the idea 
that forestry is an unskilled employment, consisting of carting 
and wood chopping, and that the preliminary production of 
timber is some natural process with which science and capital 
have little to do. Government has made no effort to grapple 
with the question, and given neither guidance nor example, 
consequently we have throughout the world an unrivalled reputa- 
tion for forest destruction and sylvicultural incompetence. 
In the United Kingdom there is little work worth recording if 
we except the production in limited quantity of beech and larch, 
of oak and ash of great durability, while we have had conspicuous 
success in the acclimatisation of several Coniferze of much pro- 
spective value. 
In the outlying empire, we find in India one notable exception 
to our rule of failure; there the forest department, organised by 
distinguished German experts, is administered by the school of 
British officers which they formed, and there the timber-revenue 
makes a notable figure in the Indian Budget. 
We have, it is true, made some effort of late years throughout 
the empire to improve our standards, to check waste in Canada 
and Australia, to plant methodically at home and in South 
Africa. The same movement is more apparent in the United 
States, where, if late in coming, it makes rapid progress. Here 
at home we begin to feel the stimulus of such institutions as the 
Arboricultural Societies, of the awaking to responsibility recently 
manifested at the Office of Woods and Forests, of the efforts of 
several lecturers at educational centres, and of some object- 
lessons in sylviculture created by private enterprise. A few 
students have been trained abroad, and a few working-plans are 
in operation, but neither the supply of trained foresters nor the 
1 Paper read at Society’s Forestry Exhibition in connection with Highland 
and Agricultural Society’s Show at Peebles, 20th July 1906. 
