150 North American Forests and Forestry 



beginning be right. You must raise the right kinds 

 of trees in the right places, and lay out your plans 

 of treating them in advance. For your crop can- 

 not be changed for a long time after you have 

 started it and, unlike the farmer, a mistake made 

 in one year cannot be corrected by you in the 

 next. The making of the working-plans for the 

 treatment of a forest is rightly considered as one 

 of the most important as well as the most difficult 

 parts of the professional forester's art. The larger 

 the forest the greater are, of course, the difficul- 

 ties of making it, but even the smallest wood-lot 

 ought to be treated according to a well-considered 

 plan in order to realize the highest benefit for the 

 owner. 



Where a person has invested a considerable por- 

 tion of his fortune in forest property it may be as- 

 sumed that he desires a continuous annual revenue 

 therefrom. As it takes a great many years before a 

 body of timber becomes ripe for the final harvest, 

 and the intermediate revenues are hardly large 

 enough to satisfy the wants of the proprietor, the 

 only way out of the difficulty is to divide the forest 

 into different bodies of different ages, so that one 

 of them may be ripe for the axe every year. From 

 this it follows easily that forestry as a business by 

 itself, not merely supplementary to a farming or 

 manufacturing enterprise, pays only on a large 

 scale, for only in that way can a sufficient cash 

 revenue be realized every year to pay reasonable 

 interest on the investment. The divisions and 



