CHAPTER V. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF PLAN. 



30. The three types of forest. 



BEFORE proceeding to consider the measures necessary for the 

 detailed organisation of a forest under any definite method of 

 treatment, it may assist a clearer understanding of the matters 

 under discussion, from a practical point of view, if we now make 

 some discrimination between the different stages of forest 

 organisation that we may have to deal with, and distinguish 

 two or three types of forest for which a working-plan may have 

 to be prepared. 



First of all then we have the rare case of the second or later 

 rotation of a completely constituted forest, which has already 

 been under intensive management for a long time, and which is 

 as nearly normal (in the strict sense of the word, which should 

 never be used in any other sense) as possible in every respect, 

 so that the sustained yield is equal to the full normal increment. 

 Such a forest could only be found in continental Europe, where 

 intensive management has been carried out for several genera- 

 tions, and where financial and actuarial methods have been 

 applied in great detail. This type of forest is the only one in 

 which the normal idea comes within the immediate range of 

 practical politics, in which valuations based on the maximum 

 expectation value of the soil are possible, and in which yield- 

 tables, increment-tables, and form-factors, are fully available. 

 It is safe to say that no such forest exists in Britain or in any 

 British possession at the present time. 



Secondly we have the more common type of a forest fairly 

 well stocked, and containing some faint resemblance to a succes- 

 sion of age-classes, but incomplete, and not regularly constituted, 

 having not yet gone through a complete rotation under the 

 present scheme of management, or perhaps now undergoing con- 

 version from irregular to even-aged high-forest. During the 

 first rotation (or, in the case of a selection forest, the first 

 few felling-cycles) the building up of a complete and properly 



