278 



WOOD AXD FOREST. 



land for fields and reserve the poorer land for forests. There are in 

 the United States enormous regions that are fit for nothing but for- 

 ests, Imt many of these, as in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, 

 have simply been denuded of their trees and no provision has been 

 made for their reproduction. This then is the second aim of for- 

 estry, — to treat the forest so that it will continue to reproduce itself. 

 In order to obtain this result, certain forest conditions have to be 

 preserved. What these conditions are, we have already noticed (see 

 Chap. V, The Forest Organism). They are partly topographical and 

 climatic and partly historical. They include such factors as, soil, 



moisture, temperature, and light, 

 the forest cover, the forest floor, 

 the density and mixture of 

 growth, all conditions of forest 

 gro-\rth. It is only as the for- 

 ester preserves these conditions, 

 or to put it otherwise, it is only 

 as he obeys the laws of the forest 

 organism that he can preserve 

 the forest. For a long period 

 of our national history, we Amer- 

 icans were compelled to conform 

 our life and institutions to the 

 presence of the primeval forest, 

 but by long observation of what 

 happens naturally in the forest, 

 there have been developed in 

 Europe and in America certain 

 ways of handling it so as to make 

 it our servant and not our master. 



These ways are called silvicultural systems. They are all based 

 on the nature of the forest itself, and they succeed only because they 

 are modifications of what takes place naturally in the woods. 



As we have seen above (p. 230) trees reproduce themselves either 

 by sjtrouts or by seeds. This fact gives rise to two general methods 

 of reproduction, called tlic coppice systems and the seed systems. 



Coppice, Fig. 123. In the simpler form of this system, the forest 

 is divided into a certain number of parts, say thirty, and one part is 

 cut down each year. New sprouts at once start up, which will ma- 



