Wilhelm Philipp Daniel Schlich aka Sir William Schlich (February 28, 1840 Flonheim - September 28, 1925) was an eminent German-born forester who worked extensively in India for the British administration.
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Schlich attended the Gymnasium in Darmstadt, and later the University of Giessen. He entered the Imperial Indian Forest Service in 1866, becoming Conservator of Forests in 1871, and Inspector-General of Forests in 1883, succeeding his mentor Dietrich Brandis. He developed forest management and education programs and spent a total of nineteen years in India, helping to establish the journal Indian Forester in 1874 (becoming its first honorary editor) [1] and the school at Dehra Dun in 1877.
In 1885 Schlich moved to England to take up the pioneering post of professor of forestry at the Royal Indian Engineering College at Coopers Hill, becoming a British subject in 1886. He moved his department to Oxford in 1905, before the college transferred to India in 1906.
Schlich was a colleague and mentor of Gifford Pinchot. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1901, awarded the Knight Commander of the Indian Empire in 1909 and was an Hon. Fellow of St John's College.
Schlich was the author of the five-volume Manual of Forestry (1889-96) published serially in three editions. The first two volumes were on silviculture, the others dealing with forest management, forest protection, and forest utilisation. Schlich's Manual became the standard and enduring textbook for forestry students. In 1904 he published Forestry in the United Kingdom.[2] Other publications were The Outlook of the World's Timber Supply and Afforestation in Great Britain and Ireland.[3]
His first wife was English, the daughter of the lexicographer Sir William Smith. The marriage produced one daughter, Gertrude. Following the death of his first wife, he married Mathilde Marsily, member of a family originally from Italy.[4]