A reaction from the indiscriminate application of the shelterwood method to the hardwoods and of the clearing method to the pine set in during the last quarter of the 19th century under the lead of Burkhardt and Gayer. These advocated return to mixed forest and to natural regeneration with long periods, approaching a selection forest. Gayer especially, professor of silviculture at Munich, became the foremost apostle of this school. Yet even to this day, the principles of silvicultural treatment under the many different conditions remain unsettled. On the whole however, with the financial question assiduously brought forward, the clearing system has made most progress, and the selection system has nearly vanished, being replaced by the group method and the shelterwood system. A number of special forms of silvicultural management applicable under special conditions have been locally developed, without, however, gaining much ground and being mainly of historical value. Among these may be mentioned _Seebach’s Modified Beech Forest_, which consists in opening up a beech stand so as to secure regeneration, merely to form a soil cover, leaving enough of the old stand on the ground to close up in thirty or forty years. By this treatment the large increment due to open position is secured without endangering the soil. Similarly the _Storied_ or _Two-aged High forest_, was applied to the management of oak forest in mixture with beech. In a few localities also, on limited areas, a combination of forest and farming (_Waldfeldbau_) has been continued and elaborated, besides the more general use of coppice and coppice with standards. According to the statistics for 1900 the following distribution of the acreage under different silvicultural methods prevailed throughout the empire: Deciduous Coniferous Per cent. Per cent. Total Forest 32.5 67.5 High Forest 18.4 60.1 Selection Forest 2.3 7.4 Coppice 6.8 -- Coppice with standards 5. -- Coniferous forest, of which 68% is pine and 30% spruce, prevails in Eastern and Middle Germany, deciduous forest, of which 20% is oak, the balance principally beech, in the West and South. Coppice and coppice with standards are mostly in private hands as well as the coniferous selection forest, the State forests being almost entirely high forest, i.e., seed forest, other than under selection method.