4 Richard H. Boerker 
strides have been made in the last ten years on both public and 
private holdings, and obviously this is the first step towards forest 
management. Such intensive silvicultural operations as planting 
and thinning are being practised principally in the east, while ex- 
tensive forestry involving the selection and shelterwood systems 
of management is almost the rule in the west. As might be 
expected, in the west forest planting is still in its experimental 
stage. On the whole economic conditions in the east have favored 
the development of both public and private forestry and hence 
this activity has been on a more intensive scale there than in the 
west. That forestry in some sections of the country is not de- 
veloping as fast as some conservationists might wish is due to the 
fact that it is being held back by certain conditions and elements 
of environment which by their very nature belong to a new 
country with enormous natural resources like ours and over 
which human endeavor has no control. It must be realized that 
forestry never developed in any country in the world as fast as 
it has in the United States in the last twenty-five years, and that 
at the present time it is proceeding as fast as is consistent with 
sound principles and existing economic conditions. 
While the practice of forestry is making rapid strides, silvi- 
cultural investigations are still in the infancy of their develop- 
ment. In other words the practice of forestry and the science 
of forestry have not developed in a ratio which would make them 
mutually helpful. The greater development of the applied phases 
of forestry is due partly to economic conditions and partly also to 
a lack of appreciation of the value of purely scientific research. 
The tendency has always been to magnify the industrial branch 
of a science at the expense of the main body from which it had 
its origin. Purely scientific botany has been largely lost sight of 
in the face of such of its branches as bacteriology, plant breeding, 
pathology, etc. Similarly the science of silvics has had to give 
way to seemingly more important phases concerned with the 
utilization of forests. In these days of commercial ideals when 
the value of most things is gauged by what they will bring on the 
market, I fear that undue emphasis has been placed upon the 
economic or applied phases of a science. Hence it is not strange 
