26 



EDUCATION IN FORESTRY. 



necessary to take the raw edge off of the forester's ignorance without neces- 

 sarily making him a logging engineer. The subject is basic in importance. 

 If this is followed by a course in forest improvements and about 6 credits in 

 lumbering, the forester should be able to get by as a superintendent or even 

 manage small operations directly. 



Three hours for forest protection are ample to cover the subject, outside of 

 pathology and entomology. 



If surveying is included with engineering, the comparison is as follows, 

 exclusive of lumbering and protection: 



Nor is this general course intended to create specialists fitted for research in 

 silviculture, technology, or forest protection. Such courses will show the same 

 character of variation which California's five-year course shows for the special- 

 ized logging engineering training. 



The object of the course as planned for the other branch of technique dealing 

 with the forest as a living organism is not therefore to overload the student 

 with botany, silvics, and ecology, but to cover these subjects adequately. They 

 require greater weight than other sciences, since forestry is primarily the art 

 of growing trees. 



Under site factors one credit usually omitted can well be devoted to meteor- 

 ology. Six may be divided between geology and soils. Mineralogy, on the other 

 hand, may easily be overdone; we are not training economic geologists. It is 

 doubtful whether more than 12 credits should be devoted to botany, exclusive 

 of dendrology. The 8 additional credits required by the Yale course tend to 

 develop specialists in ecology, and the time so spent is needed in economics. 



Dendrology can utilize from five to six hours, since this course can be made 

 a connecting link with silvics on the one hand and wood utilization and prop- 

 erties on the other, by discussing the habits, requirements, and properties of the 

 different species. 



Three hours each is adequate for forest pathology and forest entomology. 

 The separation of forest ecology, under the term " silvics," from silviculture is 

 proper, and requires three to four hours. Seeding and planting commonly takes 

 four hours. The time devoted to silviculture varies with the amount of instruc- 

 tive field work possible, and in regions of second growth seven hours can be 

 profitably devoted to this subject. 



Even with these minimum requirements, scant time is left for the develop- 

 ment of zoology leading to fish and game culture, a subject which Cornell has 

 always retained. This is one of the specialties and may increase in impor- 

 tance with the growth of the need for game propagation and protection. Nor 

 can we hope to devote much more than seven hours to wood, either in micro- 

 scopic study, identification, or treatment. 



No effort has been made to present a course giving these studies in sequence. 

 This is a matter which er.ch institution can work out on its own lines. The 

 evidence based on existing courses seems to show unmistakably that a four- 



