16 The Forest of the Ancients. 
Forest management proper, 1. e., regulated use for 
continuity, except in coppice, seems nowhere to have 
been practiced by the ancients, although silviculture 
in artificial plantations, or rather arboriculture, was 
well established and even attempts at replacement in the 
selection forest seem to have occasionally been made. 
Not only were many arboricultural practices of to-day 
well known to them, but also a number of the still un- 
settled controversies in this field were then already sub- 
jects of discussion. 
The culling system of taking only the most desirable 
kinds, trees and cuts, which has characterized until 
recently our American lumbering methods was naturally 
the one under which the mixed forest was utilized. Fire 
used in the pasture woods for the same purposes as with 
us effectively prevented reproduction in these and de- 
stroyed gradually the remnants of old trees. 
Only where for park and hunting purposes some care 
was bestowed upon the woodland, was reproduction pur- 
posely attempted, as, for instance, when an underwood 
was to be established for game cover in a hunting park. 
The treatment of the coppice and methods of sowing 
and planting were well understood in spite of the lack 
of natural sciences. Whatever forestry practice existed 
was based on empirical observations and taught in the 
books on agriculture as a part of farm practice. 
For Greece, we find, besides what can be learned from 
the historians Herodotus and Xenophon and from the 
natural history of Aristotle, the first work on plant 
history and wood technology, if not forestry, in 18 vol- 
