Colerus relied upon home experience and not, as Petrus de Crescentiis in his earlier work, Praedium rusticum (translated from the French, in 1592), had done, upon the scholastic expositions of the Italians. He was rewarded by the popularity of his work which went through thirteen editions and became very widely known.
Somewhat earlier, a jurist, Noë Meurer, wrote a book on forest law and hunting (second edition, 1576), which on this field remained long an authority, and gives insight into the condition of forest use at the time.
But the first independent work on forestry, divorced from the hunt and farming, did not appear until 1713, Sylvicultura œconomica, written by the Saxon director of mines, Hans Carl v. Carlowitz.
This book, while containing quaint and amusing ideas, gives many correct rules for silvicultural methods, especially as regards planting and sowing, but the subject of forest management or organization is entirely neglected.
At about the same time (1710) a forest official, v. Göchhausen, published Notabilia venatoris, which, however, contained little more than a description of the species of trees and methods of their utilization.
About the middle of the 18th century great activity began in the literary field. This was carried on by two distinct classes of writers, namely, the empiricists and the cameralists. The former—the holzgerechte Jäger—were the “practical” men of the woods who proved in many directions most unpractical, and exhibited in their writings, outside of the record of their limited experience, the crassest ignorance. The cameralists were educated in law and political economy and, while lacking practical contact with the woodswork, tried to sift and systematize the knowledge of the empiricists, and to secure for it a tangible basis.
Some five or six of the empiricists deserve notice as writers; the first and most noted of them was Doebel (Heinrich Wilhelm) whose book, Jägerpraktica (hunters’ practice), published in 1746, remained an authority until modern times for the part referring to the chase. The author was pre-eminently a hunter, who worked in various capacities in Saxony, a self-taught man with very little knowledge of natural history. Being familiar mainly with broadleaf forest he condemned planting and thinning, but described quite well for his time the methods of survey, subdivision, estimating and measuring, and the methods of selection forest and coppice with standards. His ignorance is characterized by his reference to the “sulphurous and nitric elements of the soil” as cause of spontaneous forest fires.
Opinionated and one-sided, like many so-called practical men, he came into polemic controversies with other practitioners, not less opinionated, among them J. G. Beckmann, who worked in another part of Saxony, where, having to deal with coniferous woods, he had gathered different experiences from those of Doebel. Although he was himself poorly educated, especially in natural sciences, he complained of the ignorance of the foresters, and in his book (Anweisung zu einer pfleglichen Forstwirthschaft, 1759), used for the first time the word Forstwissenschaft (forest science), and insisted upon the necessity of studying nature.
He may be credited with having really advanced forest organization by devising the first good volume division method, and silviculture by advocating the method of clearing followed by sowing.
The first practical forester with a university education was J. J. Büchting, who worked in the Harz mountains. His main interest lay in the direction of survey, division and orderly utilization. He did not, however, make any striking advance, except that he gave equal standing to both planting and sowing.