THE ENGLISH FORESTER 319 



When, for any particular purpose, planting was carried on, 

 it was, and still is, usual to get a nurseryman to do it by 

 contract at so much per acre, and leave the method of 

 planting and choice of species to him. In such cases the 

 resulting plantation is not always all that can be desired, 

 but it is usually quite good enough to serve as food for 

 rabbits or shelter for game. 



No doubt, during the last hundred years it has been 

 customary for a young man, anxious to work his way up as 

 a forester, to serve some sort of apprenticeship in the woods 

 of an estate, but the value of such an apprenticeship depended 

 more upon the man undergoing it than the quality of the 

 instruction so given. Forestry is a slow business at the best, 

 and the relation between cause and effect is not so patent 

 to the individual observer as in gardening or farming, where 

 a crop can be planted and reaped in one season, and the 

 necessary deductions made from the results. In forestry a 

 man may see good practice in planting or thinning, but he 

 cannot see the direct result of it, and he may see the result 

 but not the causes which produced it. Empirical forestry 

 instruction, consequently, greatly depends upon processes of 

 induction and deduction, and, as these processes may lead to 

 correct or incorrect inferences, according to the reasoning 

 powers of the individual, it is not difficult to understand that 

 rule of thumb played an important part in all forestry instruc- 

 tion in early days. In fact, the training of the forester was 

 almost entirely confined to the manual labour of planting, 

 timber-cutting, and so on, and the principles on which many 

 of the technical operations were conducted were very imper- 

 fectly understood. The general result of this training has 

 left its marks more or less clearly on English plantations 

 formed during the last century, as we have already seen ; but 

 a careful examination rarely fails to reveal that a greater 

 difference has existed between the practice of individual 

 foresters than can be attributed to training alone. 



Of course, on many small estates the system prevails of 

 tacking the supervision of the woods on to some other 

 department, and no pretence is made of keeping a proper 

 forester. In other cases the agent professes to manage the 

 woods, and a low paid forester is paid to work under him 



