4 Richard H. Boerker 



strides have been made in the last ten years on both public and 

 private holdings, and obviously this is the first step towards forest 

 management. Such intensive silvicultural operations as planting 

 and thinning are being practised principally in the east, while ex- 

 tensive forestry involving the selection and shelterwood systems 

 of management is almost the rule in the west. As might be 

 expected, in the west forest planting is still in its experimental 

 stage. On the whole economic conditions in the east have favored 

 the development of both public and private forestry and hence 

 this activity has been on a more intensive scale there than in the 

 west. That forestry in some sections of the country is not de- 

 veloping as fast as some conservationists might wish is due to the 

 fact that it is being held back by certain conditions and elements 

 of environment which by their very nature belong to a new 

 country with enormous natural resources like ours and over 

 which human endeavor has no control. It must be realized that 

 forestry never developed in any country in the world as fast as 

 it has in the United States in the last twenty-five years, and that 

 at the present time it is proceeding as fast as is consistent with 

 sound principles and existing economic conditions. 



While the practice of forestry is making rapid strides, silvi- 

 cultural investigations are still in the infancy of their develop- 

 ment. In other words the practice of forestry and the science 

 of forestry have not developed in a ratio which would make them 

 mutually helpful. The greater development of the applied phases 

 of forestry is due partly to economic conditions and partly also to 

 a lack of appreciation of the value of purely scientific research. 

 The tendency has always been to magnify the industrial branch 

 of a science at the expense of the main body from which it had 

 its origin. Purely scientific botany has been largely lost sight of 

 in the face of such of its branches as bacteriology, plant breeding, 

 pathology, etc. Similarly the science of silvics has had to give 

 way to seemingly more important phases concerned with the 

 utilization of forests. In these days of commercial ideals when 

 the value of most things is gauged by what they will bring on the 

 market, I fear that undue emphasis has been placed upon the 

 economic or applied phases of a science. Hence it is not strange 



