HISTORY OF VALUATION 7 



cut the stuff at the age of fifty, eighty or a hundred years. These 

 and many other questions must be studied and answered for each 

 stand, for each neighborhood, not merely once but repeatedly because 

 the answer varies with the premises, with success of silviculture, 

 market, transportation, cost of logging, labor in general, and many 

 other conditions. It is evident that in management the. w r ork of 

 valuation is largely a matter of weighing or statics, though a great 

 deal of simple valuation also enters. Every year dozens of stands 

 must be estimated and millions of feet of timber appraised as to 

 their proper stumpage value. 



C. HISTORY. 



Forest valuation is old. Timber was an object of traffic with 

 the ancients, and traffic is unthinkable without valuation or the 

 setting of a price on the object bought or sold. When timber was 

 shipped or rafted, forests sold or exchanged, or mortgaged as is 

 recorded as early as the days of Charlemagne, an important part of 

 the transaction was the determination of the value of the forest or 

 timber. 



Even the more modern conception of forest valuation the com- 

 parison of the growing stock to a capital increasing at a certain per 

 cent, the influence of the rotation or long interval between planting 

 and harvest, and finally the application of an orderly mathematical 

 analysis to discover the proper rotation and to compare different 

 kinds of forest, beech, spruce, etc., date back one hundred and fifty 

 years and more. 



According to Endres (p. 183) the Forest Order of the princi- 

 pality of Neuburg, Bavaria, of the year 1577 makes it clear that the 

 yield from the forest is in the nature of interest on a capital and 

 that the person in possession has no right to cut more than the 

 growth or proper yield, being entitled only to the interest. 



As early as 1623 the English economist Culpepper explained 

 that the forest could not produce a large interest rate. In 1721 

 Reaumur pointed out that too long a rotation meant real money 

 loss, and in 1742 Buffon in his "Memoirs sur la culture des forets" 

 discussed the same subject and pointed out the accumulation of ex- 

 penses in growing a forest crop. 



In 1764 the great von Zanthier, first to establish a "Meister- 

 schule" for foresters, used compound interest calculations in forest 

 valuation ; worked out a comparison for different rotations in 

 beech, a comparison of beech, spruce and oak in which all expenses 



