HISTORY OF VALUATION 9 



volume and value of the stand and the growth in time found no 

 difficult)' in adoption by the practice. But when it came to formulae 

 with compound interest and especially when these formulae seemed 

 to be wrong as soon as five per cent, the current interest rate, was 

 used and when they seemed to lead to wholesale reduction of rota- 

 tions, the practicing forester ceased to have faith and refused to 

 accept. 



Common sense and experience showed the forester that it 

 required at least eighty years (in a given case) to grow marketable 

 sizes of spruce, that smaller stufif was drug on the market. When 

 Pressler's and Heyer's calculations and formulae demanded a "finan- 

 cial" rotation of fifty years it was clear to the forester that some- 

 thing was radically wrong and even good men like Eorggreve, Urich, 

 Bose and Baur denounced the whole method. 



Some discussion is still going on, but the truth is gradually 

 becoming evident to all, that all these calculations have nothing to 

 do with the raising of timber, that this is left to silviculture and 

 regulation as guided by growth on one hand and market on the 

 other, and that these calculations merely try to supply a correct 

 measure, a reasonable, orderly, acceptable analysis to show exactly 

 what forestry is doing and what it can do in any given case. If 

 then the growth of timber is so slow that the crop increases only 

 at the rate of two per cent compound, there is no amount of calcula- 

 tion and no juggling of methods and figures which will change the 

 plain fact and only one question remains — will we keep on raising 

 timber or quit? If the timber is needed and the land will not grow 

 any other crops or do better it is quite certain that forestry will 

 continue regardless of the rate per cent which it makes on the 

 capital. 



At the same time it is becoming evident to all that valuation 

 is necessary. As pointed out before, the owner wants to know what 

 is actually made, what the land is wortli if used to raise timber, 

 whether expensive planting of transplants is actually better than 

 cheap natural reproduction, etc. And he is not willing to take the 

 forester's mere word for it, he wants to see by what method of 

 calculation and upon what premises the recommendation is based. 



In the efforts of bringing correct forest valuation and statics 

 into the forest business the labors of Judeich, master of forest 

 regulation, stand out conspicuously. In his long and successful 

 career at the head of the Saxon forests, he not only recommended 

 but introduced everything of value into the practice and he may 

 well be regarded as the most powerful exponent of modern forest 

 statics and especially of the general usefulness of Se. 



