A Brief History of Forestry.: In Europe, the United States and Other CountriesFernow, B. E. (Bernhard Eduard)
History
A Brief History of Forestry.: In Europe, the United States and Other Countries
Fernow, B. E. (Bernhard Eduard)
Forests and forestry -- History
He may be considered as having established on a firm basis the forest
administration of Prussia; and many of the things he instituted still
prevail. In organizing the service, he introduced fixed salaries, he
relieved the foresters from financial responsibilities, transferring all
handling of money to a separate set of officials, whereby the temptation
to fraudulent practice of graft was removed, and he issued instructions
for the different grades of foresters; and every part of this work was
all his own. In regulating the forest area of the state he developed the
volume allotment method, which, however, proved too cumbersome to be
readily applied to large areas. Toward the end of his life, his work was
not entirely successful, and he lost prestige in his later years.
_Heinrich von Cotta_ (1763-1844) studied at the University of Jena, and
afterwards practiced in Thuringia, where he established a master school
at Zillbach (1795). In 1811, he was called to Saxony, as director of
forest surveys, whither he also transferred his school, at Tharandt,
which in 1816 was made a state institution and is still flourishing. In
that year he was made the director of the Bureau of Forest Management.
Like Hartig, he was eminent in the three directions of practical,
literary, and educational work, but he excelled Hartig in originality,
developing new principles and thought. Being a good plant-physiologist
and observer of nature, he developed new ideas in silviculture,
especially with reference to methods of thinning, and his “_Anweisung
zum Waldbau_,” written in the simplest, clearest and most forceful
manner, forms a classic worthy of study to this day. In the field of
forest management he became the inventor of the area allotment method
and the originator of the highly developed Saxon forest management. As
a teacher he excelled in clearness, exposition, wealth of ideas and
geniality.
Of an entirely different stamp was the third of the great masters,
_Johann Christian Hundeshagen_ (1783-1834), who having studied in
Heidelberg, became after some years of practice, professor of forestry
at Tuebingen, in 1817, and at Giessen, 1825. He was a representative of
the theoretical or philosophical side of forestry, being highly
cultivated and imbued with the spirit of science. His bent was to
systematize the knowledge in existence and extend it by means of exact
experiments. In forest organization, he invented the well known formula
method or “rational method” of regulating felling budgets and became
also one of the founders of Forest Statics (1826) which he called “the
doctrine of measuring forestal forces,” being thus the forerunner of
modern scientific forestry.
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