A Brief History of Forestry in Europe Author:Bernhard Eduard Fernow Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTORY. The value of studying the historical development of an economic subject or of a technical art which, like forestry, relies to a large exten... more »t upon empiricism, lies in the fact that it brings before us, in proper perspective, accumulated experience, and enables us to analyze cause and effect, whereby we may learn to appreciate the reasons for present conditions and the possibilities for rational advancement. If there be one philosophy more readily derivable than another from the study of the history of forestry it is that history repeats itself. The same policies and the same methods which we hear propounded to-day have at some other time been propounded and tried elsewhere: we can study the results, broaden our judgment and avoid the mistakes of others. Such study, if properly pursued, tends to free the mind from many foolish prejudices and particularly from an unreasonable partiality for our own country and its customs and methods, merely because they are our own, substituting the proper patriotism, which applies the best knowledge, wherever found, to our own necessities. Nowhere is the record of experience and the historic method of study of more value than in an empiric art like forestry, in which it takes decades, a lifetime, nay a century to see the final effects of operations. Forestry is an art born of necessity, as opposed to arts of convenience and of pleasure. Only when the natural supplies of forest products give out under the demands of civilization, or when unfavorable conditions of soil or climate induced by forest destruction necessitate a husbanding of supplies or necessitate the application of art or skill or knowledge in securing a reproduction, does the art of forestry make its appearance. Hence its beginnings occur in differe...« less