PREFACE 



a handbook useful to the forester working in a second growth or 

 for a second growtli anywhere in this country. 



Necessarily, the majority of my own work in Sylviculture was 

 embraced by the 15 years during which I had charga of a vast area 

 of woodlands in western North Carolina. It was my good fortune 

 to be confronted, within this area, by a large diversity of conditions. 

 There were 3,000 acres of abandoned farmland, which I have been 

 insLrumental in clothing with a second growth; there were 10,000 

 acres of woodlands, cut-over, burned over, and neglected before I 

 took charge, which were to be converted into cultured forests; and 

 there was the " Pisgah Forest," primeval woodlands extending over 

 100,000 acres, situated beyond the reach of the axe, and of little 

 value, extending from the valley of the French Broad River at 

 2,000 feet elevation to the Balsam Mountains at 6,000 feet eleva- 

 tion. The cut-over woodlands are typical, from the sylvic stand- 

 point, for the Piedmont region of the South; the Pisgah Forest is 

 typical for the conditions prevailing in the Appalachians. 



For brevity's sake, these types of conditions are referred to in 

 the following pages by the terms " Biltniore " and "Pisgah Forest ' 

 respectively. 



Frequent reference is made, also, to the German forests, wherein 

 I have spent the first nine years of my career as a forester; to 

 the Adirondacks to which I was introduced by Dr. B. E. Fernow, 

 Gifford Pinchot, and C. R. Pettis, and which I am visiting annually 

 accompanied by the students of the Biltmore Forest School having 

 its spring quarters in the heart of the Adirondacks. Reference is 

 further made, frequently, to Michigan, where the Biltmore Forest 

 School has its summer camp at Cadillac, Mich., and to Oregon where 

 the Biltmore Forest School sojourns at Marshfield during the fall 

 of every year. The directorate of the Biltmore Forest School, a 

 forest school living in the woods of the North, South, East and 

 West, has forced me to become intimately acquainted with the 

 possibilities of Sj'lviculture in more than one forest region. It is 

 these facts which lead me to hope that I am submitting to the 

 reader a book on American, and not on local Sylviculture. 



I should have liked immensely to insert in this book a large 

 number of pictures illustrative of the matters and things therein 

 described. Unfortunately, the funds at my command did not allow 

 of the additional expense which the extensive use of illustrations 

 would have involved. 



This book on " The art of the second growth " is the seventh 

 part of an " American Encyclopedia of American Forestry " written 

 and rewritten by me in the course of the last fourteen years. The six 

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