shall as constantly be defeated.
The same branch takes charge of the lands as soon as they have been
acquired.

The foregoing description of the work which is done in Washington by the
Forest Service may help to make clear the great variety of tasks to
which a Forester may be required to set his hand, and emphasizes the
need of a broad training not strictly confined to purely technical
lines. It would be defective as a description, however, and would fail
to show the spirit in which the work is done, if no mention were made of
the Service Meeting, at which the responsible heads of each branch and
of the work of the Forester's office meet once a week to discuss every
problem which confronts the Service and every phase of its work. This
meeting is the centre where all parts of the work of the Service come
together and arrange their mutual cooperation, and it is also the spring
from which the essential democracy of the organization takes its rise.
The Service Meeting is the best thing in the Forest Service, and that is
saying a great deal.

It must not be imagined that the maintenance of Forest Service
headquarters in Washington indicates that the actual business of
handling the National Forests is carried on at long range. In order to
avoid any such possibility the six District offices were organized in
1908. These are situated at Missoula, Denver, Albuquerque, Portland,
Ogden, and San Francisco. Each of the District offices is in charge of a
District Forester, who directs the practical carrying out of the
policies finally determined upon in Washington, after consultation with
the men in the field. The execution of all the work, the larger features
of which the Washington office decides and directs (and the details of
which it inspects), is the task of the District Forester. The District
Forester's office is necessarily organized much on the same general
lines as the Washington headquarters. Thus, the subjects of accounts,
operation, silviculture, grazing, lands, and forest products are all
represented in the District offices. In addition, a legal officer is
necessarily attached to each District office, and each District Forester
has in his District one or more forest experiment stations, employed
mainly in studying questions of growth and reproduction; and three
forest insect field stations, maintained in cooperation with the Bureau
of Entomology, are divided among the six Districts.

[Illustration: FOREST RANGERS GET