A SLOW PROCESS 237 



apart and distinct from most industries. He has no 

 prospect, as a general rule, of reaping the fruit of his 

 labours. He raises his young trees in the nursery, 

 plants them out, and watches the first stages in the 

 life of the resultant wood. Since the life or rotation 

 of this wood may be anything from sixty to over a 

 hundred years, this is the utmost he can hope to. do. 

 Succeeding generations will glean in the harvest, and 

 praise or vilify his memory according as that harvest 

 is good or bad. 



Now, this conservatism of the forester is good in 

 some ways and bad in others. To a great extent it 

 keeps him from the temptation to gamble by planting 

 on a large scale exotics of all kinds whose success in 

 their new environment is very problematical. It also 

 prevents him from experimenting, to any dangerous 

 degree, with systems of forest management with which 

 he is ill-acquainted; and which, therefore, in his hands 

 would be foredoomed to failure. The converse of this, 

 however, is equally true, and systems of management 

 quite applicable to one set of conditions are kept on 

 when these conditions have completely changed, either 

 by differences in markets, introduction of conifers for 

 broad-leaved trees or vice versa, increase in wages and 

 reduction of available amount of labour, and so on. 



A direction in which the conservatism of the British 

 forester has certainly led to an increasing and, perhaps, 

 unnecessary expense in forestry operations — and this 

 is the point which it is proposed to deal with in this 

 article — is to be found in the nature of the labour he 

 employs. There is a certain amount of work con- 

 nected with forestry at present performed by men and 



