90 AN AUSTRALIAN STUDY OF AMERICAN FORESTRY. 
3. The necessity of withholding land, the disposition of which is provided 
for by existing laws. In this class are water power or irrigation-sites, and 
mineral or medicinal springs. , 
4, Exceptional value for the land for special uses not above enumerated, 
as for example, for town sites purposes, hotel sites, &c. The disposition of 
such cases will be handled finally in the forester’s office with reference to such 
authority as may exist at the time action is taken. 
When lands in the National Forests are finally classified and segregated, 
their status is permanently established. 
Cuaprer IX. 
WORKING PLANS AND FOREST MANAGEMENT. 
AMERICAN DEVELOPMENTS. 
The European working plan is the instrument of a complex forest 
organisation. It is essentially and intensively silvicultural. It revolves 
around the problems of sustained yield and regulation of the cut. 
The instrument itself is not so much characterised by this complexity as 
the situation it reflects—the elaborately developed application of the records, 
teachings, and experiences of centuries of fixed traditions and favourable condi- 
tions—conditions too of low wages and high prices which do not and can 
never exist in Australia. 
Forests in Europe are managed almost as intensively as vegetable patches. 
They are well protected and well organised. They are divided into small 
working units by complete systems of roads and “rides,” and their history 
and that of every section and almost every tree is known and put on record 
from year to year. Silvical data are abundant and increment yield and volume 
figures are available for every unit. 
The degree of abnormality has been reduced by long-continued tending 
and already the forests approximate closely to the “normal,” i.e., ideal forest 
which the Australian Forest Services have yet to develop in the years to come 
from their present disordered wildwoods, 
As a matter of fact, working plans are nothing more than orderly records 
of information available and the deduced ideas of the manager with regard 
to the future working of the forest. 
After all, no business can be controlled effectively without system, and 
no system can be maintained effectively without being reduced to written 
records for the dual benefit of present and future users. 
This is the basic principle of scientific management and of working plans. 
It matters nothing whether the forest is managed on the basis of sustained 
yield or without any basis in forestry technique at all. If a high phase of 
development has been reached, the working plan will be a formidable one; if 
development is only beginning, the plan will be simplicity itself. 
As the forest organisation extends, so also must the working plan—its 
reflection. There must be a normal and coincident development of both. 
But it were absurd to attempt to apply to the management of the primeval 
forest, the working plan of the gardened one. 
In. the period of confused thought supervening upon the inception of 
forestry practice in the United States of America this very absurdity was 
attempted, and only now, after fifteen tyears’ experience, are American 
foresters coming to a realisation of the extent of the absurdity. 
