British Commonwealth Forestry Terminology Part 2. 230 pp. The Empire Forestry Association, London. 1957. £1 10s. Forstwirtschaftliches Fachwörterbuch. [A TECHNICAL DICTIONARY OF FORESTRY] E. Buchholz. 422 pp. Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin. 1957. 21.90 D.M. Legno - Wood - Holz. G. Trippodo. 593 pp. Federazione Nazionale dei Commercianti del Legno e del Sughero, Home. 1957. 8,500 fire.
Part 1 of the Commonwealth Forest Terminology, published early in 1953, defined some 1,700 terms relating to silviculture and management generally, together with allied subjects. Part 2 lists and defines about 2,400 terms applicable to utilization and forest products, from their source in the forest up to, and including, the stage of primary conversion, together with connected research terms. No attempt has been made to cover in detail the various products and processes of secondary manufacture. Structure, properties and defects of wood, both in the raw and converted states, are included but only grading terms of very general application are admitted and work science terminology has been left out because definitions have not yet been sufficiently formulated in English.
The two parts of this Commonwealth terminology now form a sound basis for compiling a common forest terminology for the English-speaking world, in collaboration with the Terminology Committees of the Society of American Foresters, from whose lists a number of terms have already been borrowed and incorporated This will in turn serve as the basis for preparing a multilingual forest terminology, a task which has been entrusted to the Joint FAO/IUFRO Committee on (Forest) Bibliography, with -the Commonwealth Forestry Bureau at Oxford as the organizing center.
Forstwirtschaftliches Fachwörterbuch is a useful Russian-German, German-Russian dictionary of some 12,800 words used in forestry literature, based upon three such vocabularies published in the past, namely the German-Russian Forest Vocabulary by A. Krause in 1889, the German-Russian-French, French-Russian-German Forest Terminology by W. N. Kutusow, published in 1896 as a pocket edition, and finally a comprehensive Russian-English-French German Technical Dictionary for Forest Engineers, compiled in 1936 by the L. Linde Technical Forestry Institute in Moscow.
The new dictionary includes an additional range of terms introduced into forest literature as a result of the technical and scientific progress made in Soviet Russia over the past 20 years. It comprises also words used in the related fields of botany, zoology, entomology, phytopathology, soil science, wildlife management and nature protection, where these are of particular significance to forestry.
Legno - Wood - Bois - Holz is a technical and commercial glossary of wood, attractively bound between boards of thin Finnish birch veneer. It was first presented to the forestry world at the Sixth International Timber Exhibition, held at the Ninth Trieste Fair in 1967.
The preface by the Chief of the Italian Forest Service states that the author, who for the last 20 years has been at the head of Italian organizations in the timber trade, undertook the compilation of this glossary because he considered that improvements in international co-operation and consultation in his particular field were to a large extent dependent upon a clearer understanding of the spoken and written technical word in Italian and in the three most widely-used European languages.
Die Waldkrankheiten (FOREST DISEASES), F. Schwerdtfeger. 486 pp. Illus. 2nd edition P. Parey, Hamburg - Berlin. 1957. D.M. 39.40.
In this second edition of his textbook, Dr. Schwerdtfeger has expanded and revised a number of chapters. In fact, according to the author, hardly a page of the original (1944) edition has remained unaltered.
The title might more correctly be translated as "Forest Illnesses" because the book includes considerable information on damage due to fire, smoke, weather and soil as well as nematodes, arachnids, millepedes, insects, reptiles, birds and mammals, in addition to the disease-causing agencies such as viruses, bacteria and fungi.
There are brief general chapters on forest pathology and protection, susceptibility and resistance of forest trees, disease development and manifestations, relation to silviculture and management, and prevention and control. The 10-page summary of destructive agencies arranged according to tree species and symptoms is useful for finding specific items among the very detailed information given throughout the book.
Forest Fertilization. A bibliography, with abstracts, on the use of fertilizers and soil amendments in forestry, compiled by Donald P. White and Albert L. Leaf. 303 pp. State University College of Forestry, Syracuse University, New York. 1967.
Outside forest nurseries, fertilizers or soil amendments are used in forestry on a very small scale. Only liming in a few European countries is of any importance and, furthermore, impressive results have been obtained only on young plantations with soils leached by erosion or burnt over by fire. Much research has been conducted but there is still A vast field to explore and this publication should be of use to research workers interested in this question. It contains a list of scientific periodicals carrying articles on the application of fertilizers or soil amendments, and a bibliography continuing through the autumn of 1968, with brief abstracts of each book or paper, either written by the authors themselves or taken from specialized reviews.
In the preface, the writers explain how the choice of publications has been made. In the first place, they considered those publications which deal with research and observations carried out on the use of fertilizers or nutrient-containing materials to improve the growth or effect site amelioration for forestry purposes; secondly, publications were included on the use of fertilizers in forest-nursery management, and lastly for shade trees and landscaping, although in the latter field coverage is incomplete.
Finally, although it was difficult for them to set themselves a limit, the authors cite publications on the nutrition of forest trees in greenhouse and in pot culture.
Principales cultures du Congo belge. [CULTIVATION PRACTICES IN THE BELGIAN CONGO]. Marcel van den Abeele et René Vandenput. 923 pp. Illustrations in black and white and color. 3rd ed. La Direction de l'agriculture, des forêts et de l'élevage. Brussels. 1956. 200 B fr.
This book, of which the first edition appeared about six years ago, summarizes the development of agriculture in the Belgian Congo. The rapidity with which agricultural practices have evolved anal plants or new varieties have been introduced, has necessitated the revision of the original work after this comparatively short interval.
The forester, especially the tropical forester, will certainly find most of the chapters in the book to be interesting. He will find species dealt with which are familiar to him, such as eucalypts or tannin-yielding acacias. They are included not by virtue of their timber-producing capacities but because they yield fruit, gums, tannin, and vegetable or essential oils. In other chapters, the forest, natural or restocked with appropriate species, is treated as playing an essential role in sheltering cultivated crops or protecting the arable soil.
In the Belgian Congo, there is no longer a precise dividing line between the agriculturist and the forester, and this undoubtedly begins to be true in all tropical countries and even in a large number of other regions. On the one side, the techniques used for the introduction of exotic tree species and the establishment of pure stands are largely borrowed from agriculture; and on the other, the protective role of either natural or artificial woodlands implies a kind of dual use of many areas. In their turn, many tree crop plantations, which are of considerable economic importance in tropical regions, exercise a protective role in relation to soil and water complementary to that of the true forest.
Finally, it must be borne in mind that the forest fallow in tropical regions will remain an influential factor for a long time to come. More than in other regions, perhaps, there is a many-sided interrelationship between forestry and agriculture whose complexity is set out in the section entitled "General Considerations on Agriculture in the Belgian Congo" which forms the introduction to this book.
The Challenge of Our Watersheds. 167 pp. Soil Conservation Society of India, Bihar. 1957. Rs 15/-, $4.00, £1.5.0.
This is a collection of the papers issued in connection with the FAO Development Center on Watershed Management organized in India in 1957. It elaborates the official report (FAO Report No. 703) on this center which was designed as a digest of the major features of watershed management, with emphasis on the Far East.
