CANADIAN FOEESTEY ASSOCIATION. 21 



THE FORESTRY COURSE IN A LUMBERING REGION. 



R. B. MILLER, M.F., PROFESSOR OF FORESTRY, UNIVERSITY OF 



NEW BRUNSWICK. 



During the Christmas vacation I had the privilege of attending a con- 

 ference on forestry education in Washington. According to Mr. Pinchot, 

 who called us together at the suggestion of Professor Roth, of the Uni- 

 versity of Michigan, it was the most notable gathering he had ever at- 

 tended. Professors from the different schools in the United States and 

 Canada met rather informally with a few members of the Forest Service, to 

 talk over forestry instruction. As the great majority of graduates in the 

 United States enter the Forest Service, it was really a little talk between 

 producer and consumer. The outcome will be a permanent association of 

 schools and the formulating of standards of forestry education. 



Less than twenty-five in number, these men represented widely varying 

 forest conditions, from the Pacific slope to Maine, through the Rocky 

 Mountains, Lake States, prairie, central wood-lot and New England re- 

 gions, as well as central and eastern Canada. The courses offered in the 

 schools were of all grades, from the ranger school of the west, held in 

 tents for three months of the year and with the forest at its backdoor, to 

 the graduate school in the city, with its six year course, University con- 

 nections and unlimited equipment. Yet, with all this diversity, it was re- 

 markable to see how unanimous was the opinion on certain points under 

 discussion and how each seemed to be working out a course best adapted 

 to his peculiar conditions. 



Much was said about the proper location, endowment, course of study 

 and equipment of the forestry school, and whether the city bred youth or 

 the farmer boy made the best forester. The final consensus of opinion was 

 that it was largely a matter of personality, and that you could not always 

 put your finger on the elements of success. 



One of the most interesting and suggestive papers, to one from a lum- 

 bering region, was that of Professor R. T. Fisher, of the Harvard Grad- 

 uate School. Believing that lumbering and forestry are in a sense one, be- 

 cause lumbering is the machinery through which forestry works, he has 

 organized a lumbering operation of his own, involving about three hun- 

 dred thousand board feet, on a demonstration forest of two thousand 

 acres belonging to the University. By having the students carry on the 

 work of lumbering under proper forestry regulations, he combines a high 

 degree of intensive forestry with a regular logging job, typical of that 

 region. He tries to reduce lumbering to a science, developing the subject 

 in a practical, logical way. On this tract, under a woods-boss paid by 

 the school, the students live from September to December first, doing the 

 actual woods work in all its various phases. They work with the chopping, 

 road building and other crews, and, in addition, carry on scientific inves- 

 tigations, such as studying the waste due to high stumps and other sources. 

 They learn to lead a rough life, to know all the important points in woods 

 work, and at the end present a well-arranged report on the whole opera- 



