G—3a

20. Of the three remaining schools of forestry in Western Germany, two (Freiburg and Munich) are of the first type and one (Hann-Muenden) is of the second type. Before the war (the present status of forestry education in the Eastern Zone is not known) both Tharandt and Eberswalde were of the second type, differing from Hann-Muenden in that the students of these schools took the courses of basic sciences at the nearby Universities of Dresden and Berlin respectively. 21. " As to the relative merits of one type or the other, there have been for many decades considerable differences of opinion, which were attacked and defended partly from personal and local points of view. In reality, each of these types of education has its advantages and drawbacks, which may be greater or less according to the special conditions in each individual case. The importance and reputation of a college will depend on the standing of the professors and the provision that is made for carrying on research. The variety of academic forestry education in Germany is not an evil, but is an advantage. Forestry itself is many-sided. Forestry teaching and research must rest on a basis of biology and mathematics, on the natural sciences, and on the economic and political sciences, if they are to measure up to the demands of modern forest management. None of these foundations can be omitted without giving an unnatural bias to scientific training in forestry. Besides getting this many-sided professional training that is required by the nature of the profession, it is also desirable that the young educated forester shall find opportunity to balance and supplement his purely professional training with a broad general education. This requires stimuli of the most diverse sorts, through teachers and contemporaries in other sciences and professions, and the possibility, at a receptive age, of participating in worth-while cultural and artistic pleasures. The forestry student especially needs all these things, because he will spend much of his life at isolated forest stations and will have to be the leader and counsellor of the rural population to a much greater extent than the student of most other professions. It is by no means sufficient to endow the forestry student with a lot of specific technical information ; this will always be a matter of expediency, which depends on the requirements of his future professional activities. It is much more important to acquaint him with the true nature of technical work, in addition to teaching him the methods of research in natural sciences and the spirit of scientific thought in the realms of economics and politics. For these reasons, there was an increasing tendency, during the nineteenth century, to transfer the academic study from isolated forest academies to leading universities." —Heske in " German Forestry 22. The above-quoted words, written by Dr. Heske in 1937, coincide so closely with the views of the writer of this report that they are reproduced in full as a background to a more detailed description of Hann-Muenden, which may be considered more or less representative of higher forestry education in Germany at present. 23. A forest academy was founded in 1868 at Hann-Muenden in one of the most wooded (oak and beech) districts of Germany, some eighteen miles from Goettingen; not until 1930 did it become a faculty of the University of Goettingen. The original buildings are still in use and, though impressive from the exterior, are internally obsolete ; it had been decided immediately prior to the late war to rebuild the school at Goettingen, and foundations had been laid. The war, however, interrupted this scheme, and no action has since been taken. The significance of this proposed change of location is modified by the fact that Goettingen is itself located in a forest district, and there is thus little difficulty in the accessibility of training forests. 24. Hann-Muenden is typical of the German system of intimate blending of education and research.

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