PREFACE 



The handbook on " The art of the second growth " or on 

 "American Sylviculture," herewith presented in an enlarged and 

 revised form, is the third issue of a book originally styled 

 " Biltmore Lectures on Sylviculture " when it was first published 

 in 1905. 



The tasks of Sylviculture confronting the American foresters are 

 as diversified as are the conditions governing them in a country 

 like ours which presents, within its two billion acres of land area, 

 the widest and wildest fluctuations of the factors framing the possi- 

 bility, the intensity, and the methods of American Sylviculture. 



The call for Sylviculture arose in the West at a time at which 

 it was hoped that forest plantations might influence favorably the 

 adverse climate of the newly opened prairies. 



Since that time, which lies in the seventies of the last century, 

 prairial Sylviculture has lost ground, while its importance, for 

 commonweals as well as for owners of woodlands, has become, in 

 the wooded sections of the country, an issue of American Forestry. 



The terms " Sylviculture " and " Forestry " are by no means 

 identical: Forestry comprises any and all work connected with 

 forests, inclusive of all logging and lumbering; Sylviculture is but 

 that part of Forestry which has a second growth for its object. 

 As long as there was at hand in the vast stretches of primeval 

 forests an abundance of first growth, there could exist in the 

 w^ooded states but little use for " the art of the second growth." 



No forester lives who has enjoyed a world's experience in Sylvi- 

 culture; the forester's experience is local, necessarily; a writer 

 of a book on Sylviculture is apt to apply his local observations to 

 the second growths developing in all the 48 states of the Union. 

 I have tried, in the pages foimd within the covers of this book, 

 to avoid generalisations based on a local experience, and to write 



