Career
He is said to have inspired Rudyard Kipling"s character of Muller in In the Rukh (1893), one of the earliest of his Jungle Book stories. Berthold Ribbentrop was Inspector-general of Forests to the Government of India from 1885. In 1900, he wrote Forestry in British India where he says he is coming to the end of his career.
He describes the early lack of forestry expertise among the British administrators of India, and says
"Mr.
Brandis, the then Inspector-General of Forests, was permitted, towards the close of 1866, to select two young officers trained for the Forest Service in Germany, one of these was Doctor William Schlich, my predecessor as Inspector-General of Forests and now head of the Coopers Hill Forest School, the other myself.".
