FORESTS. Figs..12-I-4S7.
If agriculture is the raising of products from the land, then forestry is a part of agriculture. In the past we have considered the forest to be the free and uncontrollable gift of nature, as are the mines, the sea and the air. We have also been obliged. in all the older regions, to destroy the forest to make it possible to practice farming. Unlike the mines and the sea, however, the forest can be renewed. The renewing is a species of crop ping. This cropping has its own laws and demands its own special practices, but it is cropping, never theless.
Most persons have the tree sense well developed, but do not have the forest sense developed. Ever so many trees may not make a forest. The forest is an organism. One tree has relation to other trees, and it thrives or fails to thrive largely be cause of that relationship. The forest has climate and weather. It has flora and fauna. The forest must be treated as a unit, not merely as a collec tion of trees, any more than a city is treated as a mere collection of houses. A person may be ever so skilful in growing forest trees and yet know nothing about forestry. A man may be ever so good a builder, but may know nothing about plan ning, organizing and administering a city.
The planting and care of trees is arboriculture. The trees may be pears, oranges, maples or pines. The raising and care of trees in forests is silricullure; this is one part of forestry. Other parts of forestry are forest management, harvesting, marketing.
If a forest is a crop, the product must be har vested. This means that the trees must be cut. The person who merely admires trees, thinks of them as inviolate. They may be inviolate in the yard or on the roadside, but in the forest they are destined for harvest, as are the stalks in a corn field. if the crop is to be harvested, provision must be made for raising a new crop. As the natural forests disappear, timber must be raised. Some of it must be raised on ordinary farms. With all the use of cement and iron, the demand for timber is increasing. A forest may be as necessary to a good-sized farm as pastures are. The farm forest,
therefore, becomes one factor in the general scheme of farm management,—as consciously part of it as the orchard, or the cereal lands, or the live-stock.
If one is to understand what forestry is, he must get it out of his head that natural forests are necessarily perfect forests. From the standpoint of products, man can grow a much better forest than the major part of the natural forests. The natural forests are likely to be as weedy as ne glected corn-fields, with whole acres that have a good tree only here and there, and great ranges of trees that are contending with most adverse con ditions.
In all the old eastern states, the woodlot is an almost constant part of the farms. It is a ready source of home supplies. In the last census year New York furnished more than seven and one-half millions of dollars' worth of farm forest products (probably one-third of the state is in woodland), leading all the states and being closely seconded only by Michigan. Probably every one of these farm woodlots can be improved more markedly than can the orchards on the same farms.
The novelty of systematized ideas about forest cropping is indicated by the newness of the word forestry itself. The first lexicon definition of for estry in this country seems to have appeared in Webster's Dictionary in 1880. Even in 1895 the Standard Dictionary defined it as a word of very limited usage. At the present day it is misunder stood by the greater part of the persons who use it : most of them think it means merely tree-plant ing, even shade-tree planting ; others think it means the cutting or lumbering of the native for ests. It is not the purpose of the Editor to attempt a definition here—what has just preceded may give a hint, and what is to come will explain some of the field ; —but it may be said that it has to do both with the making of new forests and with the utili zation of the old ones. A modern cyclopedia of agriculture would be greatly deficient if it omitted a rather full discussion of the subject of farm forests.