A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 789 



cut, the drain through fire and through natural causes such as dis- 

 ease and insect attacks, and the rate at which the supply was being 

 replenished through growth. There was no basis for a conclusion as 

 to what the future needs of the country for wood and other forest 

 products would be. The whole subject of forest influences upon 

 climate, water supplies, the regimen of streams, the navigability of 

 rivers and harbors, the rate and character of erosion, and the rela- 

 tionships between the forest and wild life of various kinds was prac- 

 tically unexplored. Popular opinion on some of these matters was 

 pretty well formulated, in a broad way, but was based wholly on 

 unverified generalizations derived from common observation or on 

 European thought. 



Future forests and forest products supplies were supposed to depend 

 largely on tree planting, commonly called "forest culture" and con- 

 sidered to be akin to horticulture; but many and difficult technical 

 problems had to be worked out before artificial reforestation on a 

 large scale could be successfully undertaken. Regarding the art and 

 science of silviculture as applied to the management of established 

 forests ignorance was abysmal. Even the make-up of the American 

 forests the relative representation of tree species, the complete list 

 of the native trees, the character of the undergrowth, and the rela- 

 tive representation of age classes was very imperfectly known. 

 Similarly, what the wood of these species was good for and how to 

 use to best advantage the many kinds of wood at hand were matters 

 that had never been made a subject of careful inquiry; men were 

 satisfied to take the cream, wastefully, and to use it wastefully, gov- 

 erned chiefly by the ease and cheapness with which it could be 

 obtained, handled, and worked, and by its general high quality. 



Hence the form of public action to which those solicitous over the 

 forest problem of the country naturally turned first was the building 

 up of better knowledge. One of the subjects of inquiry, it was seen, 

 should be the economic aspects of the problem how much timber 

 there was in the country, and where; how fast it was being used up, 

 and for what purposes; whether a future shortage must be looked 

 for, and if so, how soon; timber exports and imports; and so on. 

 Another subject of inquiry was the forest itself as a biological and 

 geophysical entity; the natural laws governing its distribution and 

 behavior, and its influences. A third concerned methods of use and 

 the cultural practices necessary to perpetuate the forest as a resource 

 or to provide new forests. It was to serve these purposes that Con- 

 gress first made provision for the conduct of investigations by the 

 United States Department of Agriculture; and it was chiefly for these 

 purposes that the States inaugurated their early work in forestry. In 

 other words, public forestry at the outset was primarily in the field of 

 what, with some qualifications, may be called research. 



Research is a term often loosely used nowadays to denote almost 

 any fact-gathering activity, however trivial and even mechanical its 

 character and however practical its object. Research is of course the 

 pursuit of new knowledge. Whether its ultimate object is utilitarian 

 or to obtain new knowledge as an end in itself, increase of knowledge 

 is its immediate goal. Man has been accumulating knowledge 

 through observation and experience during the whole period of human 

 history, as a by product, so to speak, of his struggle to live and better 

 his condition; but research builds up knowledge in a different way. 



