FORES* EXPLOITAtiON. i7t 



it is necessary, along with the charts of different sections, to 

 have inventories of the trees upon them, with specifications 

 of their kind, age, size, vigour of growth, and conditions 

 favourable to this, or otherwise with indications of the 

 extent to which these conditions are so. In making sub- 

 sections it is necessary to class together plots or parcels 

 which, at the time of exploitation, under one form or 

 another, will yield equivalent products, or products so 

 proportioned that the superabundance of those of one may 

 compensate any. deficiency in those of another; it is neces- 

 sary to bring all the trees growing on each plot into as 

 nearly as possible a uniform state and size ; to convert, it 

 may be, a coppice wood into a timber forest, or a timber 

 forest into a coppice wood, or a wood consisting of a 

 mixture of -timber trees and coppice into one or other; or 

 to convert a coppice wood permanently or temporarily into 

 such a mixed wood; or, it may be, to bring a forest of 

 mixed woods of different kinds into plots or parcels more 

 or less extensive of one or other of the kinds of trees grow- 

 ing there. 



In view of the whole case, with charts and inventories 

 before him, and a general knowledge of contingencies to 

 be anticipated, the forest engineer — it may be the 

 engineer-in-chief, it may be some one to whom he has 

 delegated the work to be done subject to his approval, it 

 may be some professional official in the office of the 

 Minister of State entrusted with the administration of the 

 forests — it might, for that matter, be some professor of 

 forest science and forest economy residing in another 

 land — has to prepare a general scheme of operations for it 

 may be a hundred years or more to come, divided into 

 definite periods, it may be decades, periods of ten years, 

 but generally it is periods of longer duration ; a pro- 

 gramme of operations which it is proposed should be 

 carried through in the first of these periods ; and a pro- 

 gramme of operations proposed conditionally for execution 

 during one or more of the periods following. In the pro- 

 grammes for single periods there are specified what plots 



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