NOTES AND COMMENT 



During the years in which the national Forest Service has been under- 

 going rapid groAvth and development, its leaders have become increas- 

 ingly aware of the necessity of a broad foundation of scientific principles 

 for the regulation of its manifold technical activities. The forest crop 

 of the United States is almost as varied as its agricultural crop, and 

 its production is conditioned by quite as great an arraj^ of determining 

 factors. The agricultural crop is produced speedily, usually in a few 

 months, and is from the start a product of the activity of man; the 

 forest crop is the growth of decades or of centuries, and its inception 

 has usually taken place under natural conditions. These circumstances 

 are to be held accountable for the tardiness with which foresters, as 

 compared with agriculturists, have come to recognise the value of scien- 

 tific investigation in laying secure foundations for their work. The 

 Report of the Forester for 1912 calls attention to the steps which have 

 been taken by the Forest Service to promote the carrying out of experi- 

 mental work in reforestation and "forest influences" as well as in forest 

 management, fire protection and other more pfactical matters. A cen- 

 tral committee has been appointed to supervise the investigation, to 

 determine the lines of work which are most urgent, and to prevent 

 unnecessary duplication of work within the Service. The actual re- 

 searches are being carried out at a series of Forest Experiment Stations, 

 which are to all intents and purposes close analogues of the agricultural 

 experiment stations, with differences due to the dissimilarity of the end 

 products of these two great branches of applied botany, and to the 

 slowness which the longevity of trees imposes on experimental work 

 with the forest crop. 



Six Forest Experiment Stations are now in operation at widely sepa- 

 rated localities in western National Forests, and cooperative work is 

 being carried on in two other places. The oldest of these is the Fort 

 Valle}^ Experiment Station, estabhshed in 1908 and located in the 

 Coconino Forest in northern Arizona. The group of problems with 

 Avhich this station is concerned center about the reproduction of the 

 western yellow pine, the chief commercial tree of the national forests 

 of Arizona and New Mexico. Seed production and viability, natural 

 reproduction, and nursery and planting methods have already been 



