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AMERICAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION, 



20' 



The Forester, 



PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY 



The American Forestry Association, 



AND 



Devoted to Arboriculture and Forestry, the 



Care and Use of Forests and Forest 



Trees, and Related Subjects. 



The Forester assumes no responsibility for 

 opinions expressed in signed articles. 

 _ All members of the American Forestry Associa- 

 tion receive the Forester free of charge. Annual 

 fee for regular members $2.00. An application blank 

 will be found in the back of this number. 



All contributions and communications should be 

 addressed to the Editor, 



100 Atlantic Building, Washington, D.C. 



Subscriptions and remittances should be sent to 

 41 North Queen St., Lancaster, Pa., or 100 Atlantic 

 Building, Washington, D. C. 



Copyright, 1901, by the American Forestry As- 

 sociation. 



Vol. VII. 



AUGUST, 1901. 



No. 8- 



Love of Age It is a pity that an often 



in Forests. mistaken sentiment for 



woods primeval should so 

 frequently, instead of helping to per- 

 petuate the forest, confirm prejudices 

 against the true forester. The trouble is 

 not so much that those who know the im- 

 portance of a large forest crop forget it, 

 as that many men and women, thinking of 

 the forest purely and simply as a place of 

 recreation and a source of aesthetic en- 

 joyment, associate the operations of the 

 lumberman with nothing but the wiping 

 out of all they hold most dear. Yet a 

 virgin forest is an idle forest, and exten- 

 sive tracts of useful land cannot lie per- 

 manently idle in such thickly populated 

 regions as New England. The fact that 

 places like the Black Forest region in 

 Baden whose woodlands are more 

 thoroughly exploited than any others in 

 Germany are among the most admired 

 and greatly visited parts of Europe, is a 

 sharp suggestion that this fear of cutting 

 is exaggerated. And truly, the more 

 closely you examine it, the more of a pre- 

 judice does it appear to be and the less 

 like reason. 



In the first place the people who travel 

 over the roads and trails of the White 

 Mountains, and of parts of Maine, New 



^ ork, \ ermont, and of other states to the 

 south, attributing much of the charm of 

 the country to the virgin character of its 

 forests are reading into the scene what is 

 not there. For, on the one hand, what they 

 take to be an unprofaned wilderness has 

 frequently been cut over once if not many 

 times; and on the other it is impossible, 

 except in the case of young woods, to tell 

 at a distance whether a forest is first 

 growth or second. What makes the 

 beauty of the distant mountain side- 

 covered with trees, is not that these 

 separate trees are large and old, but that 

 their thronged crowns present to the eye 

 a certain surface of color, form and tex- 

 ture. The color, the form and the tex- 

 ture vary as the surface is composed of 

 the tops of conifers or of hardwoods, or 

 of trees of many sorts, they vary with the 

 seasons, with the age of the forest, and in 

 a thousand other ways, and no one with 

 half an eye would venture to say in gen- 

 eral that this or that sort of growth should 

 be preserved for the greatest beauty. For 

 scenery-lovers to call out for a primeval 

 forest as such and without further specifi- 

 cation is almost meaningless. 



Similarly the beauty of the woods for 

 him who, instead of gazing on them from 

 afar, walks beneath their shade is of so 

 many forms that to recognize them at all 

 is to abandon generalization. Beauty as 

 well as ugliness can be found anywhere, 

 under any conditions, even where the 

 echoes of the axe stroke have hardly died 

 away. Indeed if wildness is desired there 

 are few places which are so completely 

 nature's own as those abandoned clearings 

 where the lumbermen have admitted the 

 sunlight to great stretches of the forest 

 floor, and among the scattered remnants 

 of the old growth, young vegetation, birds. 

 and beasts are thronging to take advan- 

 tage of the new opportunities. ( )nce get 

 beyond the sense of the beauty of tall. 

 clear boles rising mightily in what Steven- 

 son has called " the crypt of the forest " 

 past the mere impression oi size and 

 strength and age to a just perception ol 

 the younger and more active forms 

 forest life, and one finds that they ha\ 

 beauty and self-sufficiencj of their o wn. 



