THE NEW FORESTRY. 43 



future much more than they have done in the past As regards 

 forest-tree culture, " The Forester " cannot be said to be a 

 record of personal observation and experience, but it shows 

 plainly enough that the author followed closely in the footsteps 

 of his predecessors, old and obsolete as some of them were. 



So far as we have been able to discover, there is hardly 

 an opinion or practice of any importance, on the management 

 of woods and plantations, in all Brown's work that is not dealt 

 with by writers of the last and beginning of the present (iQth) 

 century, such as Nicol, Sang, Pontz, Marshall, Loudon, Sir 

 Henry Stewart, and others, although Brown only incidentally 

 acknowledges the existence of such writers. Brown's " Prin- 

 ciples," his planting, notching, pitting, nursing, thinning, 

 pruning, etc., etc., are practically identical with those of the 

 older writers named. Indeed, the resemblance of portions of 

 " The Forester " to the works of these older writers is sugges- 

 tive, and does not harmonize with Brown's claim, p. 5, that 

 the " vast advances " made in the principle features of forest 

 tree culture were chiefly confined to a period of about thirty 

 years previous to 1880 or the period covered by the several 

 editions of his own book. This is particularly noticeable in 

 reference to such subjects as thinning and pruning, for 

 example, which Brown dilates upon at great length and often, 

 relating, p. 42, that pruning was the branch of forestry least 

 understood some forty years before 1882, and how much had 

 been learned since ; whereas he was anticipated nearly a 

 hundred years before by Sang and others. Sang practically 

 wrote Nicol's "Planters' Kalendar/' 1812, a conscientiously 

 written work, and a guide to both foresters and writers at the 

 time. 



The above references to Brown are not conceived in any 

 hostile spirit. We know him only from his writings and his 

 work on well-known estates which we are familiar with, and 

 desire only to show here that a work which, up till now, has 

 been regarded by some as a safe guide, and which professed 

 to teach the latest and best methods of forestry practice, had 

 little claim to be regarded in that light. We refer to the 

 original editions, of course, not to the Germanised edition. 



How or when Brown's system originated it is difficult to 

 say. We once thought, and it is still held by some, that his 

 system of growing timber-trees was simply the gardener's plan 

 of growing trees for ornamental purposes, carried to the 

 woods. It seems probable that it began with Evelyn, and 

 filtered down through later writers till Brown's time, as there 



