Thinning Practice. 239 



and other officers suffered similarly for this "German 

 propaganda." (see p. 242)* 



At the present time large areas of coppice and 

 of coppice with standards characterize the hold- 

 ings of the municipal and private owners, and the 

 selection forest still plays a considerable part even in 

 the State forests; the method of shelterwood in com- 

 partments, being still more under discussion than 

 found in practice. 



The main credit for advance in silvicultural direc- 

 tion which belongs to the French foresters in particu- 

 lar is the development of new and fertile ideas re- 

 garding the operations of thinnings; here the differen- 

 tiation of the crop into the final harvest (le haut) and 

 the nurse crop {le has) (see page 105) and the differen- 

 tiation of the operations, par le haut and par le has, 

 seems to have been for the first time described by Boppe 

 in 1887. Indeed, the theory of thinnings, at least, 

 seems to have been well understood by Buffon, who 

 advanced his theories in a memoir to the Academy of 

 France, in 1774, and gives a very clear exposition of 

 the value of thinnings and improvement cuttings. 



Nevertheless, thinning practice, while often accentu- 

 ated in the literature, is too often omitted in practice, 



*In this statement we follow Clav^ and other authors. Huffel takes exception 

 to this conception of the origin of the shelterwood system, because he finds in 

 some documents allusion to a modified application of the tire et aire method 

 which might be construed into shelterwood regeneration. Indeed, Guiot (1770) 

 and Varennes de Fenille (1790) describe methods of procedure which resemble 

 somewhat this method of regeneration. But as the method of successive fellings 

 was practised in Germany since 1720, and fully developed in all its detail by 1790 

 Hartig formulating merely into rules what was long practised it is likely that 

 the French authors had heard of it. Moreover, in another place (vol. Ill, p. 271) 

 Iluffel says : "At this time(1821)one made several tentative regeneration cuttings 

 by successive fellings according tc the new formula but without success." 



