THE LAST
ERRATUM
The book
Silviculture of the Temperate Zone,
which was published in Dutch seventy years ago,
counted, all told, twenty-nine
errata.
Its price badly hurt our poor students' pockets,
but with its five hundred seventy-six pages,
this was less than one error per twenty pages.
Under Fagus, among which the common beech,
we were asked to read "Lipsky" instead of "Lipcky".
No beech would take much notice of such a typo.
The cricket bat willow was hit harder.
At the end the
cricket had become a
circket.
Such a crooked mishit would have stopped them all
from rubbing their wings together, had they known.
And yet the Silberpappel fared worst of all.
This German name for the white poplar occurred
at one place in the book as
Siebenpappel,
at another —bye Pappel— as
Siebenappel.
Since
sieben means
seven and
appel nothing,
this would have left a German-speaking person
in a fog about this aspect of forestry.
Despite these few mistakes,
Silviculture
was a solid piece of scientific work
by the Agricultural University.
All the
errata were neatly listed,
free of charge, in a supplementary list
fixed with glue to the beginning of the hardback.
Fifty-six years later in the same Low Countries
i am reading something again about
Fagus sylvatica, '
die Mutter des Waldes',
with its healthy influence on the forest floor;
the 'drama queen' that reacts so animately
to dire, or just unfavorable, conditions
(and always managed to recover nonetheless).
They say the beech is not going to make it here,
if climate change keeps rolling on at this rate,
something by no means mentioned in the book.
With hindsight, this fact about Fagus was missing:
its future fate in the last
erratum.
