"A field, about five miles from Northampton, on an eminence called Rail

Hill, was cultivated about a century ago. The native growth here, and in

all the surrounding region, was wholly oak, chestnut, etc. As the field

belonged to my grandfather, I had the best opportunity of learning its

history. It contained about five acres, in the form of an irregular

parallelogram. As the savages rendered the cultivation dangerous, it was

given up. On this ground there sprang up a grove of white pines covering

the field and retaining its figure exactly. So far as I remember, there

was not in it a single oak or chestnut tree ... There was not a single

pine whose seeds were, or, probably, had for ages been, sufficiently

near to have been planted on this spot. The fact that these white pines

covered this field exactly, go as to preserve both its extent and its

figure, and that there were none in the neighborhood, are decisive

proofs that cultivation brought up the seeds of a former forest within

the limits of vegetation, and gave them an opportunity to germinate."

See, on the Succession of the Forest, Thoreau, Excursions, p. l35 et

seqq.]

Although, therefore, the destruction of a wood and the reclaiming of the

soil to agricultural uses suppose the death of its smaller dependent

flora, these revolutions do not exclude the possibility of its

resurrection. In a practical view of the subject, however, we must admit

that when the woodman fells a tree he sacrifices the colony of humbler

growths which had vegetated under its protection. Some wood-plants are

known to possess valuable medicinal properties, and experiment may show

that the number of these is greater than we now suppose. Few of them,

however, have any other economical value than that of furnishing a

slender pasturage to cattle allowed to roam in the woods; and even this

small advantage is far more than compensated by the mischief done to the

young trees by browsing animals. Upon the whole, the importance of this

class of vegetables, as physic or as food, is not such as to furnish a

very telling popular argument for the conservation of the forest as a

necessary means of their perpetuation. More potent remedial agents may

supply their place in the materia medica, and an acre of grass-land

yields more nutriment for cattle than a range of a hundred acres of

forest. But he whose sympathies with nature have taught him to feel that

there is a fellowship between all God's creatures; to love the brilliant

ore better than the dull ingot, iodic silver and crystallized red copper

better than the shillings and the pennies forged from them by the

coiner's cunning; a venerable oak-tree than the brandy-cask whose staves

are split out from its heart-wood; a bed of anemones, hepaticas, or wood

violets than the leeks and onions which he may grow on the soil they

have enriched and in the air they made fragrant--he who has enjoyed that

special training of the heart and intellect which can be acquired only

in the unviolated sanctuaries of nature, "where man is distant, but God is

near"--will not rashly assert his right to extirpate a tribe of harmless

vegetables, barely because their products neither tickle his palate nor

fill his pocket; and his regret at the dwindling area of the forest

solitude will be augmented by the reflection that the nurselings of the

woodland perish with the pines, the oaks, and the beeches that sheltered

them. [Footnote: Quaint old Valvasor had observed the subduing influence

of nature's solitudes. In describing the lonely Canker-Thal, which,

though rocky, was in his time well wooded with "fir, larches, beeches

and other trees," he says:

"Gladsomeness and beauty, which dwell in many valleys, may not be looked

for there. The journey through it is cheerless, melancholy, wearisome,

and serveth to temper and mortify orer-joyousness of thought ... In sum

it is a very desert, wherein the wildness of human pride doth grow

tame."--Ehre der Crain, i., p. 186, b.]

Although, as I have said in a former chapter, birds do not frequent the

deeper recesses of the wood, yet a very large proportion of them build

their nests in trees, and find in their foliage and branches a secure

retreat from the inclemencies of the seasons and the pursuit of the

reptiles and quadrupeds which prey upon them. The borders of the forests

are vocal with song; and when the gray and dewy morning calls the

creeping things of the earth out of their night-cells, it summons from

the neighboring wood legions of their winged enemies, which swoop down

upon the fields to save man's harvests by devouring the destroying worm,

and surprising the lagging beetle in his tardy retreat to the dark cover

where he lurks through the hours of daylight.

The insects most injurious to the rural industry of the garden and the

ploughland do not multiply in or near the woods. The locust, which

ravages the East with its voracious armies, is bred in vast open plains

which admit the full heat of the sun to hasten the hatching of the eggs,

gather no moisture to destroy them, and harbor no bird to feed upon

thelarvae. [Footnote: Smela, in the government of Kiew, has, for some

years, not suffered at all from the locusts, which formerly came every

year in vast swarms, and the curculio, so injurious to the turnip crops,

is less destructive there than in other parts of the province. This

improvement is owing partly to the more thorough cultivation of the

soil, partly to the groves which are interspersed among the ploughlands.

... When in the midst of the plains woods shall be planted and filled

with insectivorous birds, the locusts will cease to be a plague and a

terror to the farmer.--Rentzsch, Der Wald, pp. 45, 46.] It is only since

the felling of the forests of Asia Minor and Cyrene that the locust has

become so fearfully destructive in those countries; and the grasshopper,

which now threatens to be almost as great a pest to the agriculture of

some North American soils, breeds in seriously injurious numbers only

where a wide extent of surface is bare of woods.

General Functions of Forests.

In the preceding pages we have seen that the electrical and chemical

action of the forest, though obscure, exercises probably a beneficial,

certainly not an injurious, influence on the composition and condition

of the atmosphere; that it serves as a protection against the diffusion

of miasmatic exhalations and malarious poisons; that it performs a most

important function as a mechanical shelter from blasting winds to

grounds and crops in the lee of it; that, as a conductor of heat, it

tends to equalize the temperature of the earth and the air; that its

dead products form a mantle over the surface, which protects the earth

from excessive heat and cold; that the evaporation from the leaves of

living trees, while it cools the air around them, diffuses through the

atmosphere a medium which resists the escape of warmth from the earth by

radiation, and hence that its general effect is to equilibrate caloric

influences and moderate extremes of temperature.

We have seen, further, that the forest is equally useful as a regulator

of terrestrial and of atmospheric humidity, preventing by its shade the

drying up of the surface by parching winds and the scorching rays of the

sun, intercepting a part of the precipitation, and pouring out a vast

quantity of aqueous vapor into the atmosphere; that if it does not

increase the amount of rain, it tends to equalize its distribution both

in time and in place; that it preserves a hygrometric equilibrium in the

superior strata of the earth's surface; that it maintains and regulates

the flow of springs and rivulets; that it checks the superficial

discharge of the waters of precipitation and consequently tends to

prevent the sudden rise of rivers, the violence of floods, the formation

of destructive torrents, and the abrasion of the surface by the action

of running water; that it impedes the fall of avalanches and of rocks,

and destructive slides of the superficial strata of mountains; that it

is a safeguard against the breeding of locusts, and finally that it

furnishes nutriment and shelter to many tribes of animal and of

vegetable life which, if not necessary to man's existence, are conducive

to his rational enjoyment. In fine, in well-wooded regions, and in

inhabited countries where a due proportion of soil is devoted to the

growth of judiciously distributed forests, natural destructive

tendencies of all sorts are arrested or compensated, and man, bird,

beast, fish, and vegetable alike find a constant uniformity of condition

most favorable to the regular and harmonious coexistence of them all.

General Consequences of the Destruction of the Forest.

With the extirpation of the forest, all is changed. At one season, the

earth parts with its warmth by radiation to an open sky--receives, at

another, an immoderate heat from the unobstructed rays of the sun. Hence

the climate becomes excessive, and the soil is alternately parched by

the fervors of summer, and seared by the rigors of winter. Bleak winds

sweep unresisted over its surface, drift away the snow that sheltered it

from the frost, and dry up its scanty moisture. The precipitation

becomes as irregular as the temperature; the melting snows and vernal

rains, no longer absorbed by a loose and bibulous vegetable mould, rush

over the frozen surface, and pour down the valleys seawards, instead of

filling a retentive bed of absorbent earth, and storing up a supply of

moisture to feed perennial springs. The soil is bared of its covering of

leaves, broken and loosened by the plough, deprived of the fibrous

rootlets which held it together, dried and pulverized by sun and wind,

and at last exhausted by new combinations. The face of the earth is no

longer a sponge, but a dust-heap, and the floods which the waters of the

sky pour over it hurry swiftly along its slopes, carrying in suspension

vast quantities of earthy particles which increase the abrading power

and mechanical force of the current, and, augmented by the sand and

gravel of falling banks, fill the beds of the streams, divert them into

new channels, and obstruct their outlets. The rivulets, wanting their

former regularity of supply and deprived of the protecting shade of the

woods, are heated, evaporated, and thus reduced in their summer

currents, but swollen to raging torrents in autumn and in spring. From

these causes, there is a constant degradation of the uplands, and a

consequent elevation of the beds of water-courses and of lakes by the

deposition of the mineral and vegetable matter carried down by the

waters. The channels of great rivers become unnavigable, their estuaries

are choked up, and harbors which once sheltered large navies are shoaled

by dangerous sand-bars. The earth, stripped of its vegetable glebe,

grows less and less productive, and, consequently, less able to protect

itself by weaving a new network of roots to bind its particles together,

a new carpeting of turf to shield it from wind and sun and scouring

rain. Gradually it becomes altogether barren. The washing of the soil

from the mountains leaves bare ridges of sterile rock, and the rich

organic mould which covered them, now swept down into the dank low

grounds, promotes a luxuriance of aquatic vegetation, that breeds fever,

and more insidious forms of mortal disease, by its decay, and thus the

earth is rendered no longer fit for the habitation of man. [Footnote:

Almost every narrative of travel in those countries which were the

earliest seats of civilization, contains evidence of the truth of these

general statements, and this evidence is presented with more or less

detail in most of the special works on the forest which I have occasion

to cite. I may refer particularly to Hohenstein, Der Wald, 1860, as

full of important facts on this subject. See also Caimi, Cenni sulla

Importanza dei Boschi, for some statistics, not readily found elsewhere,

on this and other topics connected with the forest.]

To the general truth of this sad picture there are many exceptions, even

in countries of excessive climates. Some of these are due to favorable

conditions of surface, of geological structure, and of the distribution

of rain; in many others, the evil consequences of man's improvidence

have not yet been experienced, only because a sufficient time has not

elapsed, since the felling of the forest, to allow them to develop

themselves. But the vengeance of nature for the violation of her

harmonies, though slow, is sure, and the gradual deterioration of soil

and climate in such exceptional regions is as certain to result from the

destruction of the woods as is any natural effect to follow its cause.

Due Proportion of Woodland.

The proportion of woodland that ought to be permanently maintained for

its geographical and atmospheric influences varies according to the

character of soil, surface, and climate. In countries with a humid sky,

or moderately undulating surface and an equable temperature, a small

extent of forest, enough to serve as a mechanical screen against the

action of the wind in localities where such protection is needed,

suffices. But most of the territory occupied by civilized man is

exposed, by the character of its surface and its climate, to a physical

degradation which cannot be averted except by devoting a large amount of

soil to the growth of the woods.

From an economical point of view, the question of the due proportion of

forest is not less complicated or less important than in its purely

physical aspects. Of all the raw materials which nature supplies for

elaboration by human art, wood is undoubtedly the most useful, and at

the same time the most indispensable to social progress. [Footnote: In

an imaginary dialogue in the Recepte Veritable, the author, Palissy,

having expressed his indignation at the folly of men in destroying the

woods, his interlocutor defends the policy of felling them, by citing

the example of "divers bishops, cardinals, priors, abbots, monkeries and

chapters, which, by cutting their woods, have made three profits, "the

sale of the timber, the rent of the ground, and the "good portion" they

received of the grain grown by the peasants upon it. To this argument

Palissy replies: "I cannot enough detest this thing, and I call it not

an error, but a curse and a calamity to all France; for when forests

shall be cut, all arts shall cease, and they which practise them shall

be driven out to eat grass with Nebuchadnezzar and the beasts of the

field. I have divers times thought to set down in writing the arts which

shall perish when there shall be no more wood; but when I had written

down a great number, I did perceive that there could be no end of my

writing, and having diligently considered, I found there was not any

which could be followed without wood." ... "And truly I could well

allege to thee a thousand reasons, but 'tis so cheap a philosophy, that

the very chamber-wenches, it they do but think, may see that without

wood, it is not possible to exercise any manner of human art or

cunning."--Oeuvres de Bernard Pallisy . Paris, 1844, p. 89.]

The demand for wood, and of course the quantity of forest required to

furnish it, depend upon the supply of fuel from other sources, such as

peat and coal, upon the extent to which stone, brick, or metal can

advantageously be substituted for wood in building, upon the development

of arts and industries employing wood and other forest products as

materials, and upon the cost of obtaining them from other countries, or

upon their commercial value as articles of export.

Upon the whole, taking civilized Europe and America together, it is

probable that from twenty to twenty-five per cent. of well-wooded

surface is indispensable for the maintenance of normal physical

conditions, and for the supply of materials so essential to every branch

of human industry and every form of social life as those which compose

the harvest of the woods.

There is probably no country--there are few large farms even--where at

least one-fourth of the soil is not either unfit for agricultural use,

or so unproductive that, as pasture or as ploughland, it yields less

pecuniary return than a thrifty wood. Every prairie has its sloughs

where willows and poplars would find a fitting soil, every Eastern farm

its rocky nooks and its barren hillsides suited to the growth of some

species from our rich forest flora, and everywhere belts of trees might

advantageously be planted along the roadsides and the boundaries and

dividing fences. In most cases, it will be found that trees may be made

to grow well where cultivated crops will not repay the outlay of

tillage, and it is a very plain dictate of sound economy that if trees

produce a better profit than the same ground would return if devoted to

grass or grain, the wood should be substituted for the field.

Woodland in European Countries.

In 1862, Rentzsch calculated the proportions of woodland in different

European countries as follows: [Footnote: Der Wald, pp. 123, 124.]

Norway.................................. 66 per cent.

Sweden.................................. 60 "

Russia.................................. 30.00 "

Germany................................. 26.58 "

Belgium................................. 18.52 "

France.................................. 16.79 "

Switzerland............................. 15 "

Sardinia................................. 12.29

Neapolitan States........................ 9.43 "

Holland.................................. 7.10 "

Spain.................................... 5.52 "

Denmark.................................. 5.50 "

Great Britain............................ 5 "

Portugal................................. 4.40 "

The large proportion of woodland in Norway and Sweden is in a great

measure to be ascribed to the mountainous character of the surface,

which renders the construction of roads difficult and expensive, and

hence the forests are comparatively inaccessible, and transportation is

too costly to tempt the inhabitants to sacrifice their woods for the

sake of supplying distant markets.

The industries which employ wood as a material have only lately been

much developed in these countries, and though the climate requires the

consumption of much wood as a fuel, the population is not numerous

enough to create, for this purpose, a demand exceeding the annually

produced supply, or to need any great extension of cleared ground for

agricultural purposes. Besides this, in many places peat is generally

employed as domestic fuel. Hence, though Norway has long exported a

considerable quantity of lumber, [Footnote: Railway-ties, or, as they

are called in England, sleepers, are largely exported from Norway to

India, and sold at Calcutta at a lower price than timber of equal

quality can be obtained from the native woods.--Reports on Forest

Conservancy, vol. i., pt. ii., p. 1533.

From 1861 to 1870 Norway exported annually, on the average, more than

60,000,000 cubic feet of lumber.--Wulfsberg, Norges Velstandskilder.

Christiania, 1872.] and the iron and copper works of Sweden consume

charcoal very largely, the forests have not diminished rapidly enough to

produce very sensible climatic or even economic evils.

At the opposite end of the scale we find Holland, Denmark, Great

Britain, Spain, and Portugal. In the three first-named countries a cold

and humid climate renders the almost constant maintenance of domestic

fires a necessity, while in Great Britain especially the demand of the

various industries which depend on wood as a material, or on mechanical

power derived from heat, are very great. Coal and peat serve as a

combustible instead of wood in them all, and England imports an immense

quantity of timber from her foreign possessions. Fortunately, the

character of soil, surface, and climate renders the forest of less

importance as a geographical agent in these northern regions than in

Spain and Portugal, where all physical conditions concur to make a large

extent of forest an almost indispensable means of industrial progress

and social advancement.

Rentzsch, in fact, ascribes the political decadence of Spain almost

wholly to the destruction of the forest. "Spain," observes he, "seemed

destined by her position to hold dominion over the world, and this in

fact she once possessed. But she has lost her political ascendancy,

because, during the feeble administration of the successors of Philip

II., her exhausted treasury could not furnish the means of creating new

fleets, the destruction of the woods having raised the price of timber

above the means of the state." [Footnote: Der Wald, p. 63. Antonio Ponz

(Viage de Espana, i., prologo, p. lxiii.), says: "Nor would this be so

great an evil, were not some of them declaimers against TREES, thereby

proclaiming themselves, in some sort, enemies of the works of God, who

gave us the leafy abode of Paradise to dwell in, where we should be even

now sojourning, but for the first sin, which expelled us from it."

I do not know at what period the two Castiles were bared of their woods,

but the Spaniard's proverbial "hatred of a tree" is of long standing.

Herrera combats this foolish prejudice; and Ponz, in the prologue to the

ninth volume of his journey, says that many carried it so far as

wantonly to destroy the shade and ornamental trees planted by the

municipal authorities. "Trees," they contended, and still believe,

"breed birds, and birds eat up the grain." Our author argues against the

supposition of the "breeding of birds by trees," which, he says, is as

absurd as to believe that an elm-tree can yield pears; and he charitably

suggests that the expression is, perhaps, a maniere de dire, a popular

phrase, signifying simply that trees harbor birds.] On the other hand,

the same writer argues that the wealth and prosperity of modern England

are in great part due to the supply of lumber, as well as of other

material for ship-building, which she imports from her colonies and

other countries with which she maintains commercial relations.

Forests of Great Britain.

The proportion of forest is very small in Great Britain, where, as I

have said, on the one hand, a prodigious industrial activity requires a

vast supply of ligneous material, but where, on the other, the abundance

of coal, which furnishes a sufficiency of fuel, the facility of

importation of timber from abroad, and the conditions of climate and

surface combine to reduce the necessary quantity of woodland to its

lowest expression.

With the exception of Russia, Denmark, and parts of Germany, no European

countries can so well dispense with the forests, in their capacity of

conservative influences, as England and Ireland. Their insular position

and latitude secure an abundance of atmospheric moisture; the general

inclination of surface is not such as to expose it to special injury

from torrents, and it is probable that the most important climatic

action exercised by the forest in these portions of the British empire,

is in its character of a mechanical screen against the effects of wind.

The due proportion of woodland in England and Ireland is, therefore, a

question not of geographical, but almost purely of economical,

expediency, to be decided by the comparative direct pecuniary return

from forest-growth, pasturage, and ploughland.

Contrivances for economizing fuel came later into use in the British

Islands than on the Continent. Before the introduction of a system of

drainage, the soil, like the sky, was, in general, charged with

humidity; its natural condition was unfavorable for the construction and

maintenance of substantial common roads, and the transportation of so

heavy a material as coal, by land, from the remote counties where alone

it was mined in the Middle Ages, was costly and difficult. For all these

reasons, the consumption of wood was large, and apprehensions of the

exhaustion of the forests were excited at an early period. Legislation

there, as elsewhere, proved ineffectual to protect them, and many

authors of the sixteenth century express fears of serious evils from the

wasteful economy of the people in this respect. Harrison, in his curious

chapter "Of Woods and Marishes" in Holinshed's compilation, complains of

the rapid decrease of the forests, and adds: "Howbeit thus much I dare

affirme, that if woods go so fast to decaie in the next hundred yeere of

Grace, as they haue doone and are like to doo in this, . . . it is to be

feared that the fennie bote, broome, turfe, gall, heath, firze, brakes,

whinnes, ling, dies, hassacks, flags, straw, sedge, reed, rush, and also

seacole, will be good merchandize euen in the citie of London, whereunto

some of them euen now haue gotten readie passage, and taken up their

innes in the greatest merchants' parlours . . . . I would wish that I

might liue no longer than to see foure things in this land reformed,

that is: the want of discipline in the church: the couetous dealing of

most of our merchants in the preferment of the commodities of other

countries, and hinderance of their owne: the holding of faires and

markets vpon the sundaie to be abolished and referred to the

wednesdaies: and that euerie man, in whatsoeuer part of the champaine

soile enioieth fortie acres of land, and vpwards, after that rate,

either by free deed, copie hold, or fee farme, might plant one acre of

wood, or sowe the same with oke mast, hasell, beech, and sufficient

prouision be made that it may be cherished and kept. But I feare me that

I should then liue too long, and so long, that I should either be wearie

of the world, or the world of me." [Footnote: Holinshed, reprint of

1807, i., pp. 357, 358. It is evident from this passage, and from

another on page 397 of the same volume, that, though seacoal was largely

exported to the Continent, it had not yet come into general use in

England. It is a question of much interest, when mineral coal was first

employed in England for fuel. I can find no evidence that it was used as

a combustible until more than a century after the Norman conquest. It

has been said that it was known to the Anglo-Saxon population, but I am

acquainted with no passage in the literature of that people which proves

this. The dictionaries explain the Anglo-Saxon word grofa by sea-coal. I

have met with this word in no Anglo-Saxon work, except in the Chronicle,

A.D. 852, from a manuscript certainly not older than the 12th century,

and in two citations from Anglo-Saxon charters, one published by Kemble

in Codex Diplomaticus, the other by Thorpe in Diplomatarium Anglicum, in

all which passages it more probably means peat than mineral coal.

According to Way, Promptorium Parrulorum, p. 506, note, the Catholicon

Anglicanum has "A turfe grafte, turbarium." Grafte is here evidently the

same word as the A.-S. grafa, and the Danish Torvegraf, a turf-pit,

confirms this opinion. Coal is not mentioned in King Alfred's Bede, in

Neckam, in Glanville or in Robert of Gloucester, though the two latter

writers speak of the allied mineral, jet, and are very full in their

enumeration of the mineral productions of the island. In a Latin poem

ascribed to Giraldus Cambrensis, who died after the year 1220, but found

also in the manuesripts of Walter Mapes (see Camden Society edition, pp.

131 and 350), and introduced into Higden's Polychronicon (London, 1865,

pp. 398, 399), carbo sub terra cortice, which can mean nothing but

pit-coal, is enumerated among the natural commodities of England. Some

of the translations of the 13th and 14th century render carbo by cool or

col, some by gold, and some omit this line, as well as others

unintelligible to the translators. Hence, although Giraldus was

acquainted with coal, it certainly was not generally known to English

writers until at least a century after the time of that author.

The earliest mediaeval notice of mineral coal I have met with is in a

passage cited by Ducange from a document of the year 1198, and it is an

etymological observation of some interest, that carbones ferrei, as

sea-coal is called in the document, are said by Ducange to have been

known in France by the popular name of hulla, a word evidently identical

with the modern French houille and the Cornish Huel, which in the form

wheal is an element in the name of many mining localities.

England was anciently remarkable for its forests, but Caesar says it

wanted the fagus and the abies. There can be no doubt that fagus means

the beech, which, as the remains in the Danish peat-mosses show, is a

tree of late introduction into Denmark, where it succeeded the fir, a

tree not now native to that country. The succession of forest crops

seems to have been the same in England; for Harrison, p. 359, speaks of

the "great store of firre" found lying "at their whole lengths" in the

"fens and marises" of Lancashire and other counties, where not even

bushes grew in his time. We cannot be sure what species of evergreen

Caesar intended by abies. The popular designations of spike-leaved trees

are always more vague and uncertain in their application than those of

broad-leaved trees. PINUS, PINE, has been very loosely employed even in

botanical nomenclature, and KIEFER, FICHTE, and TANNE are often

confounded in German.--Rossmassler, Der Wald, pp. 256, 289, 324. A

similar confusion in the names of this family of trees exists in India.

Dr. Cleghorn, Inspector-General of the Indian Forests, informs us in his

official Circular No. 2, that the name of deodar is applied in some

provinces to a cypress, in some to a cedar, and in others to a juniper.

If it were certain that the abies of Caesar was the fir formerly and

still found in peat-mosses, and that he was right in denying the

existence of the beech in England in his time, the observation would be

very important, because it would fix a date at which the fir had become

extinct, and the beech had not yet appeared in the island.

The English oak, though strong and durable, was not considered generally

suitable for finer work in the sixteenth century. There were, however,

exceptions. "Of all in Essex," observes Harrison, Holinshed, i., p.

357, "that growing in Bardfield parke is the finest for ioiners craft;

for oftentimes haue I seene of their workes made of that oke so fine and

faire, as most of the wainescot that is brought hither out of Danske

[Danzig]; for our wainescot is not made in England. Yet diuerse haue

assaied to deale with our okes to that end, but not with so good

successe as they haue hoped, bicause the ab or iuice will not so soone

be removed and cleane drawne out, which some attribute to want of time

in the salt water." This passage is also of interest as showing that

soaking in salt-water, as a mode of seasoning, was practised in

Harrison's time.

But the importation of wainscot, or boards for ceiling, panelling, and

otherwise finishing rooms, which was generally of oak, commenced at

least three centuries before the time of Harrison. On page 204 of the

Liber Albus mention is made of "squared oak timber," brought in from the

country by carts, and of course of domestic growth, as free of city duty

or octroi, and of "planks of oak" coming in in the same way as paying

one plank a cart-load. But in the chapter on the "Customs of

Billyngesgate," pp. 208, 209, relating to goods imported from foreign

countries, an import duty of one halfpenny is imposed on every hundred

of boards called "weynscotte"--a term formerly applied only to oak--and

of one penny on every hundred of boards called "Rygholt." The editor

explains "Rygholt" as "wood of Riga." This was doubtless pine or fir.

The year in which these provisions were made does not appear, but they

belong to the reign of Henry III.]

Evelyn's "Silva," the first edition of which appeared in 1664, rendered

an extremely important service to the cause of the woods, and there is

no doubt that the ornamental plantations in which England far surpasses

all other countries, are, in some measure, the fruit of Evelyn's

enthusiasm. In England, however, arboriculture, the planting and nursing

of single trees, has, until comparatively recent times, been better

understood than sylviculture, the sowing and training of the forest. But

this latter branch of rural improvement now receives great attention

from private individuals, though, so far as I know, not from the

National Government, except in the East Indian provinces, where the

forestal department has assumed great importance. [Footnote: The

improvidence of the population under the native and early foreign

governments has produced great devastations in the forests of the

British East Indian provinces, and the demands of the railways for fuel

and timber have greatly augmented the consumption of lumber, and of

course contributed to the destruction of the woods. The forests of

British India are now, and for several years have been, under the

control of an efficient governmental organization, with great advantage

both to the government and to the general private interests of the

people.

The official Reports on Forest Conservancy from May, 1862, to August,

1871, in 4 vols. folio, contain much statistical and practical

information on all subjects connected with the administration of the

forest.]

In fact, England is, I believe, the only European country where private

enterprise has pursued sylviculture on a really great scale, though

admirable examples have been set in many others. In England the law of

primogeniture, and other institutions and national customs which tend to

keep large estates long undivided and in the same line of inheritance,

the wealth of the landholders, the special adaptation of the climate to

the growth of forest-trees, and the difficulty of finding safe and

profitable investments of capital, combine to afford encouragements for

the plantation of forests, which scarcely exist elsewhere in the same

degree.

In Scotland, where the country is for the most part broken and

mountainous, the general destruction of the forests has been attended

with very serious evils, and it is in Scotland that many of the most

extensive British forest plantations have now been formed. But although

the inclination of surface in Scotland is rapid, the geological

constitution of the soil is not of a character to promote such

destructive degradation by running water as in Southern France, and it

has not to contend with the parching droughts by which the devastations

of the torrents are rendered more injurious in those provinces.

It is difficult to understand how either law or public opinion, in a

country occupied by a dense and intelligent population, and,

comparatively speaking, with an infertile soil, can tolerate the

continued withdrawal of a great portion of the territory from the

cultivation of trees and from other kinds of rural economy, merely to

allow wealthy individuals to amuse themselves with field-sports. In

Scotland, 2,000,000 acres, as well suited to the growth of forests and

for pasture as is the soil generally, are withheld from agriculture,

that they may be given up to herds of deer protected by the game laws. A

single nobleman, for example, thus appropriates for his own pleasures

not less than 100,000 acres. [Footnote: Robertson, Our Deer Forests.

London, 1867.] In this way one-tenth of all the land of Scotland is

rendered valueless in an economical point of view--for the returns from

the sale of the venison and other game scarcely suffice to pay the

game-keepers and other incidental expenses--and in these so-called

FORESTS there grows neither building timber nor fire-wood worth the

cutting, as the animals destroy the young shoots.

Forests of France.

The preservation of the woods was one of the wise measures recommended

to France by Sully, in the time of Henry IV., but the advice was little

heeded, and the destruction of the forests went on with such alarming

rapidity, that, two generations later, Colbert uttered the prediction:

"France will perish for want of wood." Still, the extent of wooded soil

was very great, and the evils attending its diminution were not so

sensibly felt, that either the government or public opinion saw the

necessity of authoritative interference, and in 1750 Mirabeau estimated

the remaining forests of the kingdom at seventeen millions of hectares

[42,000,000 acres]. In 1860 they were reduced to eight millions

[19,769,000 acres], or at the rate of 82,000 hectares [202,600 acres]

per year. Troy, from whose valuable pamphlet, Etude sur le Reboisement

des Montagnes, I take these statistical details, supposes that

Mirabeau's statement may have been an extravagant one, but it still

remains certain that the waste has been enormous; for it is known that,

in some departments, that of Ariege, for instance, clearing has gone on

during the last half-century at the rate of three thousand acres a year,

and in all parts of the empire trees have been felled faster than they

have grown. [Footnote: Among the indirect proofs of the comparatively

recent existence of extensive forests in France, may be mentioned the

fact that wolves were abundant, not very long since, in parts of the

empire where there are now neither wolves nor woods to shelter them.

Arthur Young more than once speaks of the "innumerable multitudes" of

these animals which infested France in 1789, and George Sand states, in

the Histoire de ma Vie, that some years after the restoration of the

Bourbons, they chased travellers on horseback in the southern provinces,

and literally knocked at the doors of her father-in-law's country seat.

Eugenie de Guerin, writing from Rayssac in Languedoc in 1831 speaks of

hearing the wolves fighting with dogs in the night under her very

windows. Lettres, 2d ed., p. 6.

There seems to have been a tendency to excessive clearing in Central and

Western, earlier than in South-eastern, France. Bernard Palissy, in the

Recepte Veritable, first printed in 1563, thus complains: "When I

consider the value of the least clump of trees, or even of thorns, I

much marvel at the great ignorance of men, who, as it seemeth, do

nowadays study only to break down, fell, and waste the fair forests

which their forefathers did guard so choicely. I would think no evil of

them for cutting down the woods, did they but replant again some part of

them; but they care nought for the time to come, neither reck they of

the great damage they do to their children which shall come after

them."--Oeuvres Completes de Bernard Pallisy, 1844, p. 88.] The total

area of France in Mirabeau's time, excluding Savoy, but including Alsace

and Lorraine, was about one hundred and thirty-one millions of acres.

The extent of forest supposed by Mirabeau would be about thirty-two per

cent. of the whole territory. In a country and a climate where the

conservative influences of the forest are so necessary as in France,

trees must cover a large surface and be grouped in large masses, in

order to discharge to the best advantage the various functions assigned

to them by nature. The consumption of wood is rapidly increasing in that

empire, and a large part of its territory is mountainous, sterile, and

otherwise such in character or situation that it can be more profitably

devoted to the growth of wood than to any agricultural use. Hence it is

evident that the proportion of forest in 1750, taking even Mirabeau's

large estimate, was not very much too great for permanent maintenance,

though doubtless the distribution was so unequal that it would have been

sound policy to fell the woods and clear land in some provinces, while

large forests should have been planted in others. [Footnote: The view I

have taken of this point is confirmed by the careful investigation of

Rentzsch, who estimates the proper proportion of woodland to entire

surface at twenty-three per cent. for the interior of Germany, and

supposes that near the coast, where the air is supplied with humidity by

evaporation from the sea, it might safely be reduced to twenty per cent.

See Rentzsch's very valuable prize essay, Der Wald im Haushalt der Natur

und der Volkswirthschaft. cap. viii.

The due proportion in France would considerably exceed that for the

German States, because France has relatively more surface unfit for any

growth but that of wood, because the form and geological character of

her mountains expose her territory to much greater injury from torrents,

and beause at least her southern provinces are more frequently visited

both by extreme droughts and by deluging rains.] During the period in

question France neither exported manufactured wood or rough timber, nor

derived important collateral advantages of any sort from the destruction

of her forests. She is consequently impoverished and crippled to the

extent of the difference between what she actually possesses of wooded

surface and what she ought to have retained. [Footnote: In 1863, France

imported lumber to the value of twenty-five and a half millions of

dollars, and exported to the amount of six and a half millions of

dollars. The annual consumption of France was estimated in 1866 at

212,000,000 cubic feet for building and manufacturing, and 1,588,300,000

for firewood and charcoal. The annual product of the forest-soil of

France does not exceed 70,000,000 cubic feet of wood fit for industrial

use, and 1,300,000,000 cubic feet consumed as fuel. This estimate does

not include the product of scattered trees on private grounds, but the

consumption is estimated to exceed the production of the forests by the

amount of about twenty millions of dollars. It is worth noticing that

the timber for building and manufacturing produced in France comes

almost wholly from the forests of the state or of the communes.--Jules

Clave, in Revue des Deux Mondes for March 1, 1866, p. 207.]

The force of the various considerations which have been suggested in

regard to the importance of the forest has been generally felt in

France, and the subject has been amply debated special treatises, in

scientific journals, and by the public press, as well as in the

legislative body of that country. Perhaps no one point has been more

prominent in the discussions than the influence of the forest in

equalizing and regulating the flow of the water of precipitation.

Opinion is still somewhat divided on this subject, but the value of the

woods as a safeguard against the ravages of torrents is universally

acknowledged, and it is hardly disputed that the rise of river-floods

is, even if as great, at least less sudden in streams having their

sources in well-wooded territory.

Upon the whole, the conservative action of the woods in regard to

torrents and to inundations has ben generally recognized by the public

of France as a matter of prime importance, and the Government of the

empire has made this principle the basis of a special system of

legislation for the protection of existing forests, and for the

formation of new. The clearing of woodland, and the organization and

functions of a police for its protection, are regulated by a law bearing

date June 18th, 1859, and provision was made for promoting the

restoration of private woods by a statute adopted on the 28th of July,

1860. The former of these laws passed the legislative body by a vote of

246 against 4, the latter with but a single negative voice. The

influence of the Government, in a country where the throne is as potent

as in France, would account for a large majority, but when it is

considered that both laws, the former especially, interfere very

materially with the rights of private domain, the almost entire

unanimity with which they were adopted is proof of a very general

popular conviction, that the protection and extension of the forests is

a measure more likely than any other to arrest the devastations of the

torrents and check the violence, if not to prevent the recurrence, of

destructive river inundations. The law of July 28th, 1860, appropriated

10,000,000 francs, to be expended, at the rate of 1,000,000 francs per

year, in executing or aiding the replanting of woods. It is computed

that this appropriation--which, considering the vast importance of the

subject, does not seem extravagant for a nation rich enough to be able

to expend annually six hundred times that sum in the maintenance of its

military establishments in times of peace--will secure the creation of

new forest to the extent of about 200,000 acres, or one fourteenth part

of the soil, where the restoration of the woods is thought feasible,

and, at the same time, specially important as a security against the

evils ascribed, in a great measure, to its destruction. [Footnote: In

1848 the Government of the so-called French Republic sold to the Bank of

France 187,000 acres of public forests, and notwithstanding the zeal

with which the Imperial Government had pressed the protective

Iegislation of 1860, it introduced, into the Legislative Assembly in

1865 a bill for the sale, and consequently destruction, of the forests

of the state to the amount of one hundred million francs. The question

was much debated in the Assembly, and public opinion manifested itself

so energetically against the measure that the ministry felt itself

compelled to withdraw it. See the discussions in D'Alienation des Forets

de l'Etat. Paris, 1865. The late Imperial Government sold about 170,000

acres of woodland between 1852 and 1866, both inclusive. The other

Governments, since the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, alienated

more than 700,000 acres of the public forests, exclusive of sales

between 1836 and 1857, which are not reported.--Annuaire des Eaux et

Forets, 1872, p. 9.]

In 1865 the Legislative Assembly passed a bill amendatory of the law of

1860, providing, among other things, for securing the soil in exposed

localities by grading, and by promoting the growth of grass and the

formation of greensward over the surface. This has proved a most

beneficial measure, and its adoption under corresponding conditions in

the United States is most highly to be recommended. The leading features

of the system are:

1. Marking out and securing from pasturage and all other encroachments a

zone along the banks and around the head of ravines.

2. Turfing this zone, which in France accomplishes itself, if not

spontaneously, at least with little aid from art.

3. Consolidation of the scarps of the ravines by grading and wattling

and establishing barriers, sometimes of solid masonry, but generally of

fascines or any other simple materials at hand, across the bed of the

stream.

4. Cutting banquettes or narrow terraces along the scarps, and planting

rows of small deciduous trees and arborescent shrubs upon them,

alternating with belts of grass obtained by turfing with sods or sowing

grass-seeds. Planting the banquettes and slopes with bushes, and sowing

any other vegetables with tenacious roots, is also earnestly

recommended. [Footnote: See a description of similar processes

recommended and adopted by Mengotti, in his Idraulica, vol. ii., chap.

xvii.]

Remedies against Torrents.

The rural population, which in France is generally hostile to all forest

laws, soon acquiesced in the adoption of this system, and its success

has far surpassed all expectation. At the end of the year 1868 about

190,000 acres had been planted with trees, [Footnote: Travellers

spending the winter at Nice may have a good opportunity of studying the

methods of forming and conducting the rewooding of mountain slopes,

under the most unfavorable conditions, by visiting Mont Boron, in the

immediate vicinity of that city, and other coast plantations in that

province, where great difficulties have been completely overcome by the

skill and perseverance of French foresters. See Les Forets des Maures,

Revue des Eaux et Forets, January, 1869.] and nearly 7,000 acres well

turfed over in the Department of the Hautes Alpes. Many hundred ravines,

several of which had been the channels of formidable torrents, had been

secured by barriers, grading and planting, and according to official

reports the aspect of the mountains in the Department, wherever these

methods were employed, had rapidly changed. The soil had acquired such

stability that the violent rains of 1868, so destructive elsewhere,

produced no damage in the districts which had been subjected to these

operations, and numerous growing torrents which threatened irreparable

mischief had been completely extinguished, or at least rendered

altogether harmless. [Footnote: For ample details of processes and

results, see the second volume of Surrell, Etudes sur les Torrents,

Paris, 1872, and a Report by De La Grye, in the Revue des Eaux et Forets

for January, 1869.]

Besides the processes directed by the Government of France, various

subsidiary measures of an easily and economically practicable character

have been suggested. Among them is one which has long been favorably

known in our Southern States under the name of circling, and the

adoption of which in hilly regions in other States is to be strongly

recommended.

It is simply a method of preventing the wash of surface by rains, and at

the same time of providing a substitute for irrigation of steep

pasture-grounds, consisting in little more than in running horizontal

furrows along the hillsides, thus converting the scarp of the hills into

a succession of small terraces which, when once turfed over, are very

permanent. Experience is said to have demonstrated that this simple

process at least partially checks the too rapid flow of surface-water

into the valleys, and, consequently, in a great measure obviates one of

the most prominent causes of inundations, and that it suffices to retain

the water of rains, of snows, and of small springs, long enough for the

irrigation of the soil, thus increasing its product of herbage in a

fivefold proportion. [Footnote: Troy, Etude sur le Reboisement des

Montagnes, sections 6, 7, 21.]

As a further recommendation, it may be observed that this process is an

admirable preparation of the ground for forest plantations, as young

trees planted on the terraces would derive a useful protection from the

form of the surface and the coating of turf, and would also find a soil

moist enough to secure their growth.

Forests of Italy.

According to the most recent statistics, Italy has 17.64 per cent. of

woodland, [Footnote: Siemoni, Manuale d'Arte Forestale, 2 ediz.,

Firenze, 1872, p. 542.] a proportion which, considering the character of

climate and surface, the great amount of soil which is fit for no other

purpose than the growth of trees, and the fact that much of the land

classed as forest is either very imperfectly wooded, or covered with

groves badly administered, and not in a state of progressive

improvement, might advantageously be doubled. Taking Italy as a whole,

we may say that she is eminently fitted by climate, soil, and

superficial formation, to the growth of a varied and luxuriant arboreal

vegetation, and that in the interests of self-protection, the promotion

of forestal industry is among the first duties of her people. There are

in Western Piedmont valleys where the felling of the woods has produced

consequences geographically and economically as disastrous as in

South-eastern France, and there are many other districts in the Alps and

the Apennines where human improvidence has been almost equally

destructive. Some of these regions must be abandoned to absolute

desolation, and for others the opportunity of physical restoration is

rapidly passing away. But there are still millions of square miles which

might profitably be planted with forest-trees, and thousands of acres of

parched and barren hillside, within sight of almost every Italian

provincial capital, which might easily and shortly be reclothed with

verdant woods. [Footnote: To one accustomed to the slow vegetation of

less favored climes, the rapidity of growth in young plantations in

Italy seems almost magical. The trees planted along the new drives and

avenues in Florence have attained in three or four years a development

which would require at least ten in our Northern States. This, it is

true, is a special case, for the trees have been planted and tended with

a skill and care which cannot be bestowed upon a forest; but the growth

of trees little cared for is still very rapid in Italy. According to

Toscanelli, Economia rurale nella Provincia di Pisa, p. 8, note--one of

the most complete, curious, and instructive pictures of rural life which

exists in any literature--the white poplar, Populus alba, attains in the

valley of the Serchio a great height, with a mean diameter of two feet,

in twenty years. Solmi states in his Miasma Palustre, p. 115, that the

linden reaches a diameter of sixteen inches in the same period. The

growth of foreign trees is sometimes extremely luxuriant in Italy. Two

Atlas cedars, at the well-known villa of Careggi, near Florence, grown

from seed sown in 1850, measure twenty inches in diameter, above the

swell of the roots, with an estimated height of sixty feet.]

The denudation of the Central and Southern Apennines and of the Italian

declivity of the Western Alps began at a period of unknown antiquity,

but it does not seem to have been carried to a very dangerous length

until the foreign conquests and extended commerce of Rome created a

greatly increased demand for wood for the construction of ships and for

military material. [Footnote: An interesting example of the collateral

effects of the destruction of the forests in ancient Italy may be found

in old Roman architecture. In the oldest brick constructions of Rome the

bricks are very thin, very thoroughly burnt, and laid with a thick

stratum of mortar between the courses. A few centuries later the bricks

were thicker and less well burnt, and the layers of mortar were thinner.

In the Imperial period the bricks were still thicker, generally

soft-burnt, and with little mortar between the courses. This fact, I

think, is due to the abundance and cheapness of fuel in earlier, and its

growing scarceness and dearness in later, ages. When wood cost little,

constructors could afford to burn their brick thoroughly, and to burn

and use a great quantity of lime. As the price of fire-wood advanced,

they were able to consume less fuel in brick- and lime-kilns, and the

quality and quantity of brick and lime used in building were gradually

reversed in proportion.

The multitude of geographical designations in Italy which indicate the

former existence of forests show that even in the Middle Ages there were

woods where no forest-trees are now to be found. There are hundreds of

names of mediaeval towns derived from abete, acero, carpino, castagno,

faggio, frassino, pino, quercia, and other names of trees.] The Eastern

Alps, the Western Apennines, and the Maritime Alps retained their

forests much later; but even here the want of wood, and the injury to

the plains and the nagivation of the rivers by sediment brought down by

the torrents, led to legislation for the protection of the forests, by

the Republic of Venice, at various periods between the fifteenth and the

nineteenth centuries, [Footnote: See A. de Bereuger's valuable Saggio

Storico della Legislazione Veneta Forestale. Venezia, 1863.

We do not find in the Venetian forestal legislation much evidence that

geographical arguments were taken into account by the lawgivers, who

seem to have had an eye only to economical considerations.

According to Hummel, the desolation of the Karst, the high plateau lying

north of Trieste, now one of the most parched and barren districts in

Europe, is owing to the felling of the woods, centuries ago, to build

the navies of Venice. "Where the miserable peasant of the Karst now sees

nothing but bare rock swept and scoured by the raging Bora, the fury of

this wind was once subdued by mighty firs, which Venice recklessly cut

down to build her fleets."--Physische Geographie, p. 32.] by that of

Genoa as early at least as the seventeenth; and both these Governments,

as well as several others, passed laws requiring the proprietors of

mountain-lands to replant the woods. These, however, seem to have been

little observed, and it is generally true that the present condition of

the forest in Italy is much less due to the want of wise legislation for

its protection than to the laxity of the Governments in enforcing their

laws.

It is very common in Italy to ascribe to the French occupation under the

first Empire all the improvements and all the abuses of recent times,

according to the political sympathies of the individual; and the French

are often said to have prostrated every forest which has disappeared

within this century. But, however this may be, no energetic system of

repression or restoration was adopted by any of the Italian States after

the downfall of the Empire, and the taxes on forest property in some of

them were so burdensome that rural municipalities sometimes proposed to

cede their common woods to the Government, without any other

compensation than the remission of the taxes imposed on forest-lands.

[Footnote: See the Politecnico for the month of May, 1862, p. 234.]

Under such circumstances, woodlands would soon become disafforested, and

where facilities of transportation and a good demand for timber have

increased the inducements to fell it, as upon the borders of the

Mediterranean, the destruction of the forest and all the evils which

attend it have gone on at a seriously alarming rate.

Gallenga gives a striking account of the wanton destruction of the

forests in Northern Italy within his personal recollection, [Footnote:

"Far away in the darkest recesses of the mountains a kind of universal

conspiracy seems to have been got up among these Alpine people,--a

destructive mania to hew and sweep down everything that stands on

roots."--Country Life in Piedmont, p. 134.

"There are huge pyramids of mountains now bare and bleak from base to

summit, which men still living and still young remember seeing richly

mantled with all but primeval forests."--Ibid., p. 135.] and there are

few Italians past middle life whose own memory will not supply similar

reminiscences. The clearing of the mountain valleys of the provinces of

Bergamo and of Bescia is recent, and Lombardini informs us the felling

of the woods in the Valtelline commenced little more than forty years

ago.

Although no country has produced more able writers on the value of the

forest and the general consequences of its destruction than Italy, yet

the specific geographical importance of the woods, except as a

protection against inundations, has not been so clearly recognized in

that country as in the States bordering it on the north and west. It is

true that the face of nature has been as completely revolutionized by

man, and that the action of torrents has created almost as wide and as

hopeless devastation in Italy as in France; but in the French Empire the

recent desolation produced by clearing the forests is more extensive,

has been more suddenly effected, has occurred in less remote and obscure

localities, and therefore, excites a livelier and more general interest

than in Italy, where public opinion does not so readily connect the

effect with its true cause. Italy, too, from ancient habit, employs

little wood in architectural construction; for generations she has

maintained no military or commercial marine large enough to require

exhaustive quantities of timber, [Footnote: The great naval and

commercial marines of Venice and of Genoa must have occasioned an

immense consumption of lumber in the Middle Ages, and the centuries

immediately succeeding those commonly embraced in that designation. The

marine construction of that period employed larger timbers than the

modern naval architecture of most commercial countries, but apparently

without a proportional increase of strength. The old modes of

ship-building have been, to a considerable extent, handed down to very

recent times in the Mediterranean, and though better models and modes of

construction are now employed in Italian shipyards, an American or an

Englishman looks with astonishment at the huge beams and thick planks so

often employed in the construction of very small vessels navigating that

sea, and not yet old enough to be broken up as unseaworthy.] and the

mildness of her climate makes small demands on the woods for fuel.

Besides these circumstances, it must be remembered that the sciences of

observation did not become knowledges of practical application till

after the mischief was already mainly done and even forgotten in Alpine

Italy, while its evils were just beginning to be sensibly felt in France

when the claims of natural philosophy as a liberal study were first

acknowledged in modern Europe. The former political condition of the

Italian Peninsula would have effectually prevented the adoption of a

general system of forest economy, however clearly the importance of a

wise administration of this great public interest might have been

understood. The woods which controlled and regulated the flow of the

river-sources were very often in one jurisdiction, the plains to be

irrigated, or to be inundated by floods and desolated by torrents, in

another. Concert of action, on such a subject, between a multitude of

jealous petty sovereignties, was obviously impossible, and nothing but

the permanent union of all the Italian States under a single government

can render practicable the establishment of such arrangements for the

conservation and restoration of the forests, and the regulation of the

flow of the waters, as are necessary for the full development of the yet

unexhausted resources of that fairest of lands, and even for the

maintenance of the present condition of its physical geography.

The Forests of Germany.

Germany, including a considerable part of the Austrian Empire, from

character of surface and climate, and from the attention which has long

been paid in all the German States to sylviculture, is in a far better

condition in this respect than its more southern neighbors; and though

in the Alpine provinces of Bavaria and Austria the corresponding

districts of Switzerland, Italy, and France, has produced effects hardly

less disastrous, [Footnote: As an instance of the scarcity of fuel in

some parts of the territory of Bavaria, where, not long since, wood

abounded, I may mention the fact that the water of salt-springs is, in

some instances, conveyed to the distance of sixty miles, in iron pipes,

to reach a supply of fuel for boiling it down.

In France, the juice of the sugar-beet is sometimes carried three or

four miles in pipes for the same reason.

Many of my readers may remember that it was not long ago proposed to

manufacture the gas for the supply of London at the mouths of the coal-

mines, and convey it to the city in pipes, thus saving the

transportation of the coal; but as the coke and mineral tar would still

have remained to be disposed of, the operation would probably not have

proved advantageous.

Great economy in the production of petroleum has resulted from the

application of cast-iron tubes to the wells instead of barrels; the oil

is thus carried over the various inequalities of surface for three or

four miles to the tanks on the railroads, and forced into them by

steam-engines. The price of transport is thus reduced one-fifth.] yet,

as a whole, the German States, as Siemoni well observes, must be

considered as in this respect the model countries of Europe. Not only is

the forest area in general maintained without diminution, but new woods

are planted where they are specially needed, [Footnote: The Austrian

Government is making energetic efforts for the propagation of forests on

the desolate waste of the Karst. The difficulties from drought and from

the violence of the winds, which might prove fatal to young and even to

somewhat advanced plantations, are very serious, but in 1866 upwards of

400,000 trees had been planted and great quantities of seeds sown. Thus

far, the results of this important experiment are said to be

encouraging. See the Chronique Forestiere in the Revue des Eaux et

Forets, Feb. 1870.] and, though the slow growth of forest-trees in those

climates reduces the direct pecuniary returns of woodlands to a minimum,

the governments wisely persevere in encouraging this industry. The

exportation of sawn lumber from Trieste is large, and in fact the

Turkish and Egyptian markets are in great part supplied from this

source. [Footnote: For information respecting the forests of Germany, as

well as other European countries, see, besides the works already cited,

the very valuable Manuale d'Arts Forestale of Siemoni, 2de edizione,

Firenze, 1872.]

Forests of Russia.

Russia, which we habitually consider as substantially a forest

country--which has in fact a large proportion of woodland--is beginning

to suffer seriously for want of wood. Jourdier observes: "Instead of a

vast territory with immense forests, which we expect to meet, one sees

only scattered groves thinned by the wind or by the axe of the moujik,

grounds cut over and more or less recently cleared for cultivation.

There is probably not a single district in Russia which has not to

deplore the ravages of man or of fire, those two great enemies of

Muscovite sylviculture. This is so true, that clear-sighted men already

foresee a crisis which will become terrible, unless the discovery of

great deposits of some new combustible, as pit-coal or anthracite, shall

diminish its evils." [Footnote: Clave, Etudes sur l'Economie Forestiere,

p. 261. Clave adds (p. 262): "The Russian forests are very unequally

distributed through the territory of this vast empire. In the north they

form immense masses, and cover whole provinces, while in the south they

are so completely wanting that the inhabitants have no other fuel than

straw, dung, rushes, and heath." ... "At Moscow, firewood costs thirty

per cent. more than at Paris, while, at the distance of a few leagues,

it sells for a tenth of that price."

This state of things is partly due to the want of facilities of

transportation, and some parts of the United States are in a similar

condition. During a severe winter, ten or twelve years ago, the sudden

freezing of the canals and rivers, before a large American town had

received its usual supply of fuel, occasioned an enormous rise in the

price of wood and coal, and the poor suffered severely for want of it.

Within a few hours of the city were large forests and an abundant stock

of firewood felled and prepared for burning.

This might easily have been carried to town by the railroads which

passed through the woods; but the managers of the roads refused to

receive it as freight, because a rival market for wood might raise the

price of the fuel they employed for their locomotives. Truly, our

railways "want a master."

Hohenstein, who was long professionally employed as a forester in

Russia, describes the consequences of the general war upon the woods in

that country as already most disastrous, and as threatening still more

ruinous evils. The river Volga, the life artery of Russian internal

commerce, is drying up from this cause, and the great Muscovite plains

are fast advancing to a desolation like that of Persia.--Der Wald, p.

223.

The level of the Caspian Sea is eighty-three feet lower than that of the

Sea of Azoff, and the surface of Lake Aral is fast sinking. Von Baer

maintains that the depression of the Caspian was produced by a sudden

subsidence, from ecological causes, and not gradually by excess of

evaporation over supply. See Kaspische Studien, p. 25. But this

subsidence diminished the area and consequently the evaporation of that

sea, and the rivers which once maintained its ancient equilibrium ought

to have raised it to its former level, if their own flow had not been

diminished. It is, indeed, not proved that the laying bare of a wooded

country diminishes the total annual precipitation upon it; but it is

certain that the summer delivery of water from the surface of a

champaign region, like that through which the Volga, its tributaries,

and the feeders of Lake Aral, flow, is lessened by the removal of its

woods. Hence, though as much rain may still fall in the valleys of those

rivers as when their whole surface was covered with forests, more

moisture may be carried off by evaporation, and a less quantity of water

be discharged by the rivers since their basins were cleared, and

therefore the present condition of the inland waters in question may be

due to the removal of the forests in their valleys and the adjacent

plains.]

Forests of United States.

I greatly doubt whether any one of the American States, except, perhaps,

Oregon, has, at this moment, more woodland than it ought permanently to

preserve, though, no doubt, a different distribution of the forests in

all of them might be highly advantageous. It is, perhaps, a misfortune

to the American Union that the State Governments have so generally

disposed of their original domain to private citizens. It is true that

public property is not sufficiently respected in the United States; and

within the memory of almost every man of mature age, timber was of so

little value in the northernmost States that the owners of private

woodlands submitted, almost without complaint, to what would be regarded

elsewhere as very aggravated trespasses upon them. [Footnote: According

to the maxims of English jurisprudence, the common law consists of

general customs so long established that "the memory of man runneth not

to the contrary." In other words, long custom makes law. In new

countries, the change of circumstances creates new customs, and, in

time, new law, without the aid of legislation. Had the American

colonists observed a more sparing economy in the treatment of their

woods, a new code of customary forest-law would have sprung up and

acquired the force of a statute. Popular habit was fast elaborating the

fundamental principles of such a code, when the rapid increase in the

value of timber, in consequence of the reckless devastation of the

woodlands, made it the interest of the proprietors to interfere with

this incipient system of forest jurisprudence, and appeal to the rules

of English law for the protection of their woods. The courts have

sustained these appeals, and forest property is now legally as

inviolable as any other, though common opinion still combats the course

of judicial decision on such questions.] Persons in want of timber

helped themselves to it wherever they could find it, and a claim for

damages, for so insignificant a wrong as cutting down and carrying off a

few pine or oak trees, was regarded as a mean-spirited act in a

proprietor. The habits formed at this period are not altogether

obsolete, and even now the notion of a common right of property in the

woods still lingers, if not as an opinion at least as a sentiment. Under

such circumstances it has been difficult to protect the forest, whether

it belong to the State or to individuals. Property of this kind is

subject to plunder, as well as to frequent damage by fire. The

destruction from these causes would, indeed, considerably lessen, but

would by no means wholly annihilate the climatic and geographical

influences of the forest, or ruinously diminish its value as a regular

source of supply of fuel and timber.

It is evidently a matter of the utmost importance that the public, and

especially land-owners, be roused to a sense of the dangers to which the

indiscriminate clearing of the woods may expose not only future

generations, but the very soil itself. Some of the American States, as

well as the Governments of many European colonies, still retain the

ownership of great tracts of primitive woodland. The State of New York,

for example, has, in its north-eastern counties, a vast extent of

territory in which the lumberman has only here and there established his

camp, and where the forest, though interspersed with permanent

settlements, robbed of some of its finest pine groves, and often ravaged

by devastating fires, still covers far the largest proportion of the

surface. Through this territory the soil is generally poor, and even the

new clearings have little of the luxuriance of harvest which

distinguishes them elsewhere. The value of the land for agricultural

uses is therefore very small, and few purchases are made for any other

purpose than to strip the soil of its timber. It has been often proposed

that the State should declare the remaining forest the inalienable

property of the commonwealth, but I believe the motive of the suggestion

has originated rather in poetical than in economical views of the

subject. Both these classes of considerations have a real worth. It is

desirable that some large and easily accessible region of American soil

should remain, as far as possible, in its primitive condition, at once a

museum for the instruction of the student, a garden for the recreation

of the lover of nature, and an asylum where indigenous tree, and humble

plant that loves the shade, and fish and fowl and four-footed beast, may

dwell and perpetuate their kind, in the enjoyment of such imperfect

protection as the laws of a people jealous of restraint can afford them.

The immediate loss to the public treasury from the adoption of this

policy would be inconsiderable, for these lands are sold at low rates.

The forest alone, economically managed, would, without injury, and even

with benefit to its permanence and growth, soon yield a regular income

larger than the present value of the fee.

The collateral advantages of the preservation of these forests would be

far greater. Nature threw up those mountains and clothed them with lofty

woods, that they might serve as a reservoir to supply with perennial

waters the thousand rivers and rills that are fed by the rains and snows

of the Adirondacks, and as a screen for the fertile plains of the

central counties against the chilling blasts of the north wind, which

meet no other barrier in their sweep from the Arctic pole. The climate

of Northern New York even now presents greater extremes of temperature

than that of Southern France. The long-continued cold of winter is more

intense, the short heats of summer even fiercer than in Provence, and

hence the preservation of every influence that tends to maintain an

equilibrium of temperature and humidity is of cardinal importance. The

felling of the Adirondack woods would ultimately involve for Northern

and Central New York consequences similar to those which have resulted

from the laying bare of the southern and western declivities of the

French Alps and the spurs, ridges, and detached peaks in front of them.

It is true that the evils to be apprehended from the clearing of the

mountains of New York may be less in degree than those which a similar

cause has produced in Southern France, where the intensity of its action

has been increased by the inclination of the mountain declivities, and

by the peculiar geological constitution of the earth. The degradation of

the soil is, perhaps, not equally promoted by a combination of the same

circumstances, in any of the American Atlantic States, but still they

have rapid slopes and loose and friable soils enough to render

widespread desolation certain, if the further destruction of the woods

is not soon arrested. The effects of clearing are already perceptible in

the comparatively unviolated region of which I am speaking. The rivers

which rise in it flow with diminished currents in dry seasons, and with

augmented volumes of water after heavy rains. They bring down larger

quantities of sediment, and the increasing obstructions to the

navigation of the Hudson, which are extending themselves down the

channel in proportion as the fields are encroaching upon the forest,

give good grounds for the fear of irreparable injury to the commerce of

the important towns on the upper waters of that river, unless measures

are taken to prevent the expansion of "improvements" which have already

been carried beyond the demands of a wise economy.

In the Eastern United States the general character of the climate, soil,

and surface is such, that for the formation of very destructive torrents

a much longer time is required than would be necessary in the

mountainous provinces of Italy or of France. But the work of desolation

has begun even there, and wherever a rapid mountain-slope has been

stripped of wood, incipient ravines already plough the surface, and

collect the precipitation in channels which threaten serious mischief in

the future. There is a peculiar action of this sort on the sandy surface

of pine-forests and in other soils that unite readily with water, which

has excited the attention of geographers and geologists. Soils of the

first kind are found in all the Eastern States; those of the second are

more frequent in the exhausted counties of Maryland, where tobacco is

cultivated, and in the more southern territories of Georgia and Alabama.

In these localities the ravines which appear after the cutting of the

forest, through some accidental disturbance of the surface, or, in some

formations, through the cracking of the soil in consequence of great

drought or heat, enlarge and extend themselves with fearful rapidity.

In Georgia and in Alabama, Lyell saw "the beginning of the formation of

hundreds of valleys in places where the primitive forest had been

recently cut down." One of these, in Georgia, in a soil composed of clay

and sand produced by the decomposition in situ of hornblendic gneiss

with layers and veins of quartz, "and which did not exist before the

felling of the forest twenty years previous," he describes as more than

55 feet in depth, 300 yards in length, and from 20 to 180 feet in

breadth. Our author refers to other cases in the same States, "where the

cutting down of the trees, which had prevented the rain from collecting

into torrents and running off in sudden land-floods, has given rise to

ravines from 70 to 80 feet deep." [Footnote: Lyell, Principles of

Geology, 10th ed., vol i., 345-6.] Similar results often follow in the

North-eastern States from cutting the timber on the "pine plains," where

the soil is usually of a sandy composition and loose texture.

American Forest-Trees.

The remaining forests of the Northern States and of Canada no longer

boast the mighty pines which almost rivalled the gigantic sequoia and

redwood of California; and the growth of the larger forest-trees is so

slow, after they have attained to a certain size, that if every pine and

oak were spared for two centuries, the largest now standing would not

reach the stature of hundreds recorded to have been cut within two or

three generations. [Footnote: The growth of the white pine, on good soil

and in open ground, is rather rapid until it reaches the diameter of a

couple of feet, after which it is much slower. The favorite habitat of

this tree is light, sandy earth. On this soil, and in a dense wood, it

requires a century to attain the diameter of a yard. Emerson (Trees of

Massachusetts, p. 65), says that a pine of this species, near Paris,

"thirty years planted, is eighty feet high, with a diameter of three

feet." He also states that ten white pines planted at Cambridge,

Massachusetts in 1809 or 1810, exhibited, in the winter of 1841 and

1842, an average of twenty inches diameter at the ground, the two

largest measuring, at the height of three feet, four feet eight inches

in circumference; and he mentions another pine growing in a rocky swamp,

which at the age of thirty-two years, "gave seven feet in circumference

at the but, with a height of sixty-two feet six inches." This latter I

suppose to be a seedling, the others TRANSPLANTED trees, which might

have been some years old when placed where they finally grew.

The following case came under my own observation: In 1824 a pine-tree,

so small that a young lady, with the help of a lad, took it up from the

ground and carried it a quarter of a mile, was planted near a house in a

town in Vermont. It was occasionally watered, but received no other

special treatment. I measured this tree in 1860, and found it, at four

feet from the ground, and entirely above the spread of the roots, two

feet and four inches in diameter. A new measurement in 1871 gave a

diameter of two feet eight inches, being an increase of four inches in

eleven years, a slower rate than that of preceding years. It could not

have been more than three inches through when transplanted, and up to

1860 must have increased its diameter at the rate of about seven-tenths

of an inch per year, almost double its later growth. In 1871 the crown

had a diameter of 63 feet.

In the same neighborhood, elms transplanted in 1803, when they were not

above three or four inches through, had attained, in 1871, a diameter of

from four feet to four feet two inches, with a spread of crown of from

90 to 112 feet. Sugar-maples, transplanted in 1822, at about the same

size, measured two feet three inches through. This growth undoubtedly

considerably exceeds that of trees of the same species in the natural

forest, though the transplanted trees had received no other fertilizing

application than an unlimited supply of light and air.] Dr. Williams,

who wrote about sixty years ago, states the following as the dimensions

of "such trees as are esteemed large ones of their kind in that part of

America" [Vermont], qualifying his account with the remark that his

measurements "do not denote the greatest which nature has produced of

their particular species, but the greatest which are to be found in most

of our towns."

Diameter. Height.

Pine.......... 6 feet, 247 feet.

Maple......... 5 " 9 inches \

Buttonwood.... 5 " 6 " |

Elm........... 5 " |

Hemlock....... 4 " 9 " |

Oak........... 4 " > From 100 to 200 feet.

Basswood...... 4 " |

Ash........... 4 " |

Birch......... 4 " /

He adds a note saying that a white pine was cut in Dunstable, New

Hampshire, in the year 1736, the diameter of which was seven feet and

eight inches. Dr. Dwight says that a fallen pine in Connecticut was

found to measure two hundred and forty-seven feet in height, and adds:

"A few years since, such trees were in great numbers along the northern

parts of Connecticut River." In another letter, he speaks of the white

pine as "frequently six feet in diameter, and two hundred and fifty feet

in height," and states that a pine had been cut in Lancaster, New

Hampshire, which measured two hundred and sixty-four feet, Emerson wrote

in 1846: "Fifty years ago, several trees growing on rather dry land in

Blandford, Massachusetts, measured, after they were felled, two hundred

and twenty-three feet." All these trees are surpassed by a pine felled

at Hanover, New Hampshire, about a hundred years ago, and described as

measuring two hundred and seventy-four feet. [Footnote: Williams,

History of Vermont, ii., p. 53. Dwight s Travels, iv., p. 21, and iii,

p. 36. Emerson, Trees of Massachusetts, p. 61. Parish, Life of

President Wheelock, p. 56.] These descriptions, it will be noticed,

apply to trees cut from seventy to one hundred and forty years since.

Persons, whom observation has rendered familiar with the present

character of the American forest, will be struck with the smallness of

the diameter which Dr. Williams and Dr. Dwight ascribe to trees of such

extraordinary height. Individuals of the several species mentioned in

Dr. Williams's table are now hardly to be found in the same climate,

exceeding one-half or at most two-thirds of the height which he assigns

to them; but, except in the case of the oak and the pine, the diameter

stated by him would not be thought very extraordinary in trees of far

less height, now standing. Even in the species I have excepted, those

diameters, with half the heights of Dr. Williams, might perhaps be

paralleled at the present time; and many elms, transplanted, at a

diameter of six inches, within the memory of persons still living,

measure four and sometimes even five feet through. For this change in

the growth of forest-trees there are two reasons: the one is, that the

great commercial value of the pine and the oak have caused the

destruction of all the best--that is, the tallest and straightest--

specimens of both; the other, that the thinning of the woods by the axe

of the lumberman has allowed the access of light and heat and air to

trees of humbler worth and lower stature, which have survived their more

towering brethren. These, consequently, have been able to expand their

crowns and swell their stems to a degree not possible so long as they

were overshadowed and stifled by the lordly oak and pine. While,

therefore, the New England forester must search long before he finds a

pine fit to be the mast Of some great ammiral, beeches and elms and

birches, as sturdy as the mightiest of their progenitors, are still no

rarity.

[Footnote: The forest-trees of the Northern States do not attain to

extreme longevity in the dense woods. Dr. Williams found that none of

the huge pines, the age of which he ascertained, exceeded three hundred

and fifty or four hundred years, though he quotes a friend who thought

he had noticed trees considerably older. The oak lives longer than the

pine, and the hemlock-spruce is perhaps equally long lived. A tree of

this latter species, cut within my knowledge in a thick wood, counted

four hundred and eighty-six, or, according to another observer, five

hundred annual circles. Great luxuriance of animal and vegetable

production is not commonly accompanied by long duration of the

individual. The oldest men are not found in the crowded city; and in the

tropics, where life is prolific and precocious, it is also short. The

most ancient forest-trees of which we have accounts have not been those

growing in thick woods, but isolated specimens, with no taller neighbor

to intercept the light and heat and air, and no rival to share the

nutriment afforded by the soil. The more rapid growth and greater

dimensions of trees standing near the boundary of the forest, are

matters of familiar observation. "Long experience has shown that trees

growing on the confines of the wood may be cut at sixty years of age as

advantageously as others of the same species, reared in the depth of the

forest, at a hundred and twenty. We have often remarked, in our Alps,

that the trunk of trees upon the border of a grove is most developed or

enlarged upon the outer or open side, where the branches extend

themselves farthest, while the concentric circles of growth are most

uniform in those entirely surrounded by other trees, or standing

entirely alone."--A. and G. Villa, Necessita dei Boschi pp. 17, 18.]

California fortunately still preserves her magnificent sequoias, which

rise to the height of three hundred feet, and sometimes, as we are

assured, even to three hundred and sixty and four hundred feet, and she

has also pines and cedars of scarcely inferior dimensions. The public

being now convinced of the importance of preserving these colossal

trees, it is very probable that the fear of their total destruction may

prove groundless, and we may still hope that some of them may survive

even till that distant future when the skill of the forester shall have

raised from their seeds a progeny as lofty and as majestic as those

which now exist. [Footnote: California must surrender to Australia the

glory of possessing the tallest trees. According to Dr. Mueller,

Director of the Government Botanic Garden at Melbourne, a Eucalyptus,

near Healesville, measured 480 feet in height. Later accounts speak of

trees of the same species fully 500 feet in height. See Schleiden, Fur

Baum und Wald, p. 21.

If we may credit late reports, the growth of the eucalyptus is so rapid

in California, that the child is perhaps now born who will see the

tallest sequoia overtopped by this new vegetable emigrant from

Australia.]

European and American Trees compared.

The woods of North America are strikingly distinguished from those of

Europe by the vastly greater variety of species they contain. According

to Clave, there are in "France and in most parts of Europe only about

twenty forest-trees, five or six of which are spike-leaved and resinous,

the remainder broad-leaved." [Footnote: Etudes Forestieres, p. 7.] Our

author, however, doubtless means genera, though he uses the word

especes. Rossmassler enumerates fifty-seven species of forest-trees as

found in Germany, but some of these are mere shrubs, some are fruit and

properly garden trees, and some others are only varieties of familiar

species. The valuable manual of Parade describes about the same number,

including, however, two of American origin--the locust, Robinia

pseudacacia, and the Weymouth or white pine, Pinus Strobus--and the

cedar of Lebanon from Asia, which, or at least a very closely allied

species, is indigenous in Algeria also. We may then safely say that

Europe does not possess above forty or fifty native trees of such

economical value as to be worth the special care of the forester, while

the oak alone numbers more than thirty species in the United

States, [Footnote: For full catalogues of American forest-trees, and

remarks on their geographical distribution, consult papers on the

subject by Dr. J. G. Cooper, in the Report of the Smithsonian

Institution for 1858, and the Report of the United States Patent Office,

Agricultural Division, for 1860.] and some other North American genera

are almost equally diversified. [Footnote: Although Spenser's catalogue

of trees occurs in the first canto of the first book of the "Faery

Queene"--the only canto of that exquisite poem actually read by most

students of English literature--it is not so generally familiar as to

make the quotation of it altogether superfluous:

VII.

Enforst to seeke some covert nigh at hand,

A shadic grove not farr away they spide,

That promist ayde the tempest to withstand;

Whose loftie trees, yclad with sommers pride,

Did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide,

Not perceable with power of any starr:

And all within were pathes and alleies wide,

With footing worne, and leading inward farr;

Faire harbour that them seems; so in they entered ar.

VIII.

And foorth they passe, with pleasure forward led,

Joying to heare the birdes sweete harmony.

Which therein shrouded from the tempest dred,

Seemd in their song to scorne the cruell sky.

Much can they praise the trees so straight and hy,

The sayling pine; the cedar stout and tall;

The vine-propp elm; the poplar never dry;

The builder oake, sole king of forrests all;

The aspine good for staves; the cypresse funerall;

IX.

The laurell, meed of mightie conquerours

And poets sage; the firre that weepeth still;

The willow, worne of forlorn paramours;

The eugh, obedient to the benders will;

The birch for shaftes; the sallow for the mill;

The mirrhe sweete-bleeding in the bitter wound;

The warlike beech; the ash for nothing ill;

The fruitfull olive; and the platane round;

The carver holme; the maple seeldom inward sound.

Although the number of SPECIES of American forest-trees is much larger

than of European, yet the distinguishable VARIETIES are relatively more

numerous in the Old World, even in the case of trees not generally

receiving special care. This multiplication of varieties is no doubt a

result, though not a foreseen or intended one, of human action; for the

ordinary operations of European forest economy expose young trees to

different conditions from those presented by nature, and new conditions

produce new forms. All European woods, except in the remote North, even

if not technically artificial forests, acquire a more or less artificial

character from the governing hand of man, and the effect of this

interference is seen in the constant deviation of trees from the

original type. The holly, for example, even when growing as absolutely

wild as any tree can ever grow in countries long occupied by man,

produces numerous varieties, and twenty or thirty such, not to mention

intermediate shades, are described and named as recognizably different,

in treatises on the forest-trees of Europe.]

While the American forest flora has made large contributions to that of

Europe, comparatively few European trees have been naturalized in the

United States, and as a general rule the indigenous trees of Europe do

not succeed well in our climate. The European mountain-ash--which in

beauty, dimensions, and healthfulness of growth is superior to our own

[Footnote: In the Northern Tyrol mountain-ashes fifteen inches in

diameter are not uncommon. The berries are distilled with grain to

flavor the spirit.]--the horse-chestnut, and the abele, or silver

poplar, are valuable additions to the ornamental trees of North America.

The Swiss arve or zirbelkiefer, Pinus cembra, which yields a

well-flavored edible seed and furnishes excellent wood for carving, the

umbrella-pine, [Footnote: The mountain ranges of our extreme West

produce a pine closely resembling the European umbrella-pine.] which

also bears a seed agreeable to the taste, and which, from the color of

its foliage and the beautiful form of its dome-like crown, is among the

most elegant of trees, the white birch of Central Europe, with its

pendulous branches almost rivalling those of the weeping willow in

length, flexibility, and gracefulness of fall, and, especially, the

"cypresse funerall," might be introduced into the United States with

great advantage to the landscape. The European beech and chestnut

furnish timber of far better quality than that of their American

congeners. The fruit of the European chestnut, though inferior to the

American in sweetness and flavor, is larger, and is an important article

of diet among the French and Italian peasantry. The walnut of Europe,

though not equal to some of the American species in beauty of growth or

of wood, or to others in strength and elasticity of fibre, is valuable

for its timber and its oil. [Footnote: The walnut is a more valuable

tree than is generally supposed. It yields one-third of the oil produced

in France, and in this respect occupies an intermediate position between

the olive of the south and the oleaginous seeds of the north. A hectare

(about two and a half acres) will produce nuts to the value of five

hundred francs a year, which cost nothing but the gathering.

Unfortunately, its maturity must be long waited for, and more nut-trees

are felled than planted. The demand for its wood in cabinet-work is the

principal cause of its destruction. See Lavergne, Economie Rurale de la

France, p. 253.

According to Cosimo Ridolfi (Lezioni Orali, ii., p. 424), France obtains

three times as much oil from the walnut as from the olive, and nearly as

much as from all oleaginous seeds together. He states that the walnut

bears nuts at the age of twenty years, and yields its maximum product at

seventy, and that a hectare of ground, with thirty trees, or twelve to

the acre, is equal to a capital of twenty-five hundred francs.

The nut of this tree is known in the United States as the "English

walnut." The fruit and the wood much resemble those of the American

black walnut, Juglans nigra, but for cabinet-work the American is the

more beautiful material, especially when the large knots are employed.

The timber or the European species, when straight-grained, and clear, or

free from knots, is, for ordinary purposes, better than that of the

American black walnut, but bears no comparison with the wood of the

hickory, when strength combined with elasticity is required, and its nut

is very inferior in taste to that of the shagbark, as well as to the

butternut, which it somewhat resembles.

"The chestnut is more valuable still, for it produces on a sterile soil,

which, without it, would yield only ferns and heaths, an abundant

nutriment for man."--Lavergne, Economie Rurale de la France, p. 253.

I believe the varieties developed by cultivation are less numerous in

the walnut than is the chestnut, which latter tree is often grafted in

Southern Europe.

The chestnut crop of France was estimated in 1848 at 3,478,000

hectolitres, or 9,877,520 Winchester bushels, and valued at 13,528,000

francs, or more than two million and a half dollars. In Tuscany the

annual yield is computed at about 550,000 bushels.

The Tuscan peasants think the flour of the dried chestnut not less

nutritious than Indian cornmeal, and it sells at the same price, or

about three cents per English pound, in the mountains, and four cents in

the towns.] The maritime pine, which has proved of such immense use in

fixing drifting sands in France, may perhaps be better adapted to this

purpose than any of the pines of the New World, and it is of great

importance for its turpentine, resin, and tar. The epicea, or common

fir, Abies picea, Abies excelsa, Picea excelsa, abundant in the

mountains of France and the contiguous country, is known for its

product, Burgundy pitch, and, as it flourishes in a greater variety of

soil and climate than almost any other spike-leaved tree, it might be

well worth transplantation. [Footnote: This fir is remarkable for its

tendency to cicatrize or heal over its stumps, a property which it

possesses in common with some other firs, the maritime pine, and the

European larch. When these trees grow in thick clumps, their roots are

apt to unite by a species of natural grafting, and if one of them be

felled, although its own proper rootlets die, the stump may continue,

sometimes for a century, to receive nourishment from the radicles of the

surrounding trees, and a dome of wood and bark of considerable thickness

be formed over it. The healing is, however, only apparent, for the

entire stump, except the outside ring of annual growth, soon dies, and

even decays within its covering, without sending out new shoots. See

Monthly Report, Department of Agriculture, for October, 1872.] The cork

oak has been introduced into California and some other parts of the

United States, I believe, and would undoubtedly thrive in the Southern

section of the Union. [Footnote: At the age of twelve or fifteen years,

the cork-tree is stripped of its outer bark for the first time. This

first yield is of inferior quality, and it employed for floats for nets

and buoys, or burnt for lampblack. After this, a new layer of cork, an

inch or an inch and a quarter in thickness, is formed about one in ten

years, and is removed in large sheets without injury to the tree, which

lives a hundred and fifty years or more. According to Clave (p. 252),

the annual product of a forest of cork oaks is calculated at about 660

kilogrammes, worth 150 frances, to the hectare, which, deducting

expenses, leaves a profit of 100 francs. This is about equal to 250

pound weight, and eight dollars profit to the acre. The cork oaks of the

national domain in Algeria cover about 500,000 acres, and are let to

individuals at rates which are expected, when the whole is rented, to

yield to the state revenue of about $2,000,000.

George Sand, in the Histoire de ma Vie, speaks of the cork-forests in

Southern France as among the most profitable of rural possessions, and

states, what I do not remember to have seen noticed elsewhere, that

Russia is the best customer for cork. The large sheets taken from the

trees are slit into thin plates, and used to line the walls of

apartments in that cold climate. On the cultivation and management of

the cork oak, see Des Incendies et de la culture du Chene-liege, in

Revue das Eaux et Forets for February, 1869.] the walnut, the chestnut,

the cork oak, the mulberry, the olive, the orange, the lemon, the fig,

and the multitude of other trees which, by their fruit, or by other

products, yield an annual revenue, nature has provided Southern Europe

with a partial compensation for the loss of the native forest. It is

true that these trees, planted as most of them are at such distances as

to admit of cultivation, or of the growth of grass among them, are but

an inadequate substitute for the thick and shady wood; but they perform

to a certain extent the same offices of absorption and transpiration,

they shade the surface of the ground, they serve to break the force of

the wind, and on many a steep declivity, many a bleak and barren

hillside, the chestnut binds the soil together with its roots, and

prevents tons of earth and gravel from washing down upon the fields and

the gardens. Fruit-trees are not wanting, certainly, north of the Alps.

The apple, the pear, and the prune are important in the economy both of

man and of nature, but they are far less numerous in Switzerland and

Northern France than are the trees I have mentioned in Southern Europe,

both because they are in general less remunerative, and because the

climate, in higher latitudes, does not permit the free introduction of

shade trees into grounds occupied for agricultural purposes. [Footnote:

The walnut, the chestnut, the apple, and the pear are common to the

border between the countries I have mentioned, but the range of the

other trees is bounded by the Alps, and by a well-defined and sharply

drawn line to the west of those mountains. From some peculiarity in the

sky of Europe, cultivated plants will thrive, in Northern Italy, in

Southern France, and even in Switzerland, under a depth of shade where

no crop, not even grass, worth harvesting, would grow in the United

States with an equally high summer temperature. Hence the cultivation of

all these trees is practicable in Europe to a greater extent than would

be supposed reconcilable with the interests of agriculture. Some idea of

the importance of the olive orchards may be formed from the fact that

Sicily alone, an island scarcely exceeding 10,000 square miles in area,

of which one-third at least is absolutely barren, has exported to the

single port of Marseilles more than 2,000,000 pounds weight olive-oil

per year, for the last thirty years.

According to Cosimo Ridolfi, Lezioni Orali, vol. ii., p. 340, in a

favorable soil and climate the average yield of oil from poorly manured

trees, which compose the great majority, is six English pounds, while

with the best cultivation it rises to twenty-three pounds. The annual

production of olive-oil in the whole of Italy is estimated at upwards of

850,000,000 pounds, and if we allow twelve pounds to the tree, we have

something more than 70,000,000 trees. The real number of trees is,

however, much greater than this estimate, for in Tuscany and many other

parts of Italy the average yield of oil per tree does not exceed two

pounds, and there are many millions of young trees not yet in bearing.

Probably we shall not exaggerate if we estimate the olive trees of Italy

at 100,000,000, and as there are about a hundred trees to the acre, the

quantity of land devoted to the cultivation of the olive may be taken at

a million acres. Although olive-oil is much used in cookery in Italy,

lard is preferred as more nutritious. Much American lard is exported to

South-eastern Italy, and olive-oil is imported in return.] The

multitude of species, intermixed as they are in their spontaneous

growth, gives the American forest landscape a variety of aspect not

often seen in the woods of Europe, and the gorgeous tints, which nature

repeats from the dying dolphin to paint the falling leaf of the American

maples, oaks, and ash trees, clothe the hillsides and fringe the

water-courses with a rainbow splendor of foliage, unsurpassed by the

brightest groupings of the tropical flora. It must be confessed,

however, that both the northern and the southern declivities of the Alps

exhibit a nearer approximation to this rich and multifarious coloring of

autumnal vegetation than most American travellers in Europe are willing

to allow; and, besides, the small deciduous shrubs which often carpet

the forest-glades of these mountains are dyed with a ruddy and orange

glow, which, in the distant landscape, is no mean substitute for the

scarlet and crimson and gold and amber of the transatlantic woodland.

[Footnote: The most gorgeous autumnal coloring I have observed in the

vegetation of Europe has been in the valleys of the Durance and its

tributaries in Dauphiny. I must admit that neither in variety nor in

purity and brilliancy of tint, does this coloring fall much, if at all,

short of that of the New England woods. But there is this difference: in

Dauphiny, it is only in small shrubs that this rich painting is seen,

while in North America the foliage of large trees is dyed in full

splendor. Hence the American woodland has fewer broken lights and more

of what painters call breadth of coloring. Besides this, the arrangement

of the leafage in large globular or conical masses, affords a wider

scale of light and shade, thus aiding now the gradation now the contrast

of tints, and gives the American October landscape a softer and more

harmonious tone than marks the humble shrubbery of the forest hillsides

of Dauphiny.

Thoreau--who was not, like some very celebrated landscape critics of the

present day, an outside spectator of the action and products of natural

forces, but, in the old religious sense, an OBSERVER of organic nature,

living, more than almost any other descriptive writer, among and with

her children--had a very eloquent paper on the "Autumnal Tints" of the

New England landscape.--See his Excursions, pp. 215 et seqq.

Few men have personally noticed so many facts in natural history

accessible to unscientific observation as Thoreau, and yet he had never

seen that very common and striking spectacle, the phosphorescence of

decaying wood, until, in the latter years of his life, it caught his

attention in a bivouac in the forests of Maine. He seems to have been

more excited by this phenomenon than by any other described in his

works. It must be a capacious eye that takes in all the visible facts in

the history of the most familiar natural object.--The Maine Woods, p.

184.]

I admit, though not without reluctance, that the forest-trees of Central

and Southern Europe have a great advantage over our own in the

corresponding latitudes, in density of foliage as well as in depth of

color and persistence of the leaves in deciduous species. An American,

who, after a long absence from the United States, returns in the full

height of summer, is painfully surprised at the thinness and poverty of

the leafage even of the trees which he had habitually regarded as

specially umbrageous, and he must wait for the autumnal frosts before he

can recover his partiality for the glories of his native woods.

None of our north-eastern evergreens resemble the umbrella pine

sufficiently to be a fair object of comparison with it. A cedar, very

common above the Highlands on the Hudson, and elsewhere, is extremely

like the cypress, straight, slender, with erect, compressed

ramification, and feathered to the ground, but its foliage is neither so

dark nor so dense, the tree does not attain the majestic height of the

cypress, nor has it the lithe flexibility of that tree. [Footnote: The

cold winter, or rather spring, of 1872 proved fatal to many cypresses as

well as olive trees in the Val d'Arno. The cypress, therefore, could be

introduced only into California and our Southern States.] In mere shape,

the Lombardy poplar nearly resembles this latter, but it is almost a

profanation to compare the two, especially when they are agitated by the

wind; for under such circumstances, the one is the most majestic, the

other the most ungraceful, or--if I may apply such an expression to

anything but human affectation of movement--the most awkward of trees.

The poplar trembles before the blast, flutters, struggles wildly,

dishevels its foliage, gropes around with its feeble branches, and

hisses as in impotent passion. The cypress gathers its limbs still more

closely to its stem, bows a gracious salute rather than an humble

obeisance to the tempest, bends to the wind with an elasticity that

assures you of its prompt return to its regal attitude, and sends from

its thick leaflets a murmur like the roar of the far-off ocean.

The cypress and the umbrella-pine are not merely conventional types of

the Italian landscape. They are essential elements in a field of rural

beauty which can be seen in perfection only in the basin of the

Mediterranean, and they are as characteristic of this class of scenery

as is the date-palm of the oases of the Eastern desert. There is

however, this difference: a single cypress or pine is often enough to

shed beauty over a wide area; the palm is a social tree, and its beauty

is not so much that of the individual as of the group. [Footnote:

European poets, whose knowledge of the date-palm is not founded on

personal observation, often describe its trunk as not only slender, but

particularly STRAIGHT. Nothing can be farther from the truth. When the

Orientals compare the form of a beautiful girl to the stem of the palm,

they do not represent it as rigidly straight, but on the contrary as

made up of graceful curves, which seem less like permanent outlines than

like flowing motion. In a palm grove, the trunks, so far from standing

planted upright like the candles of a chandelier, bend in a vast variety

of curves, now leaning towards, now diverging from, now crossing, each

other, and among a hundred you will hardly see two whose axes are

parallel.] The frequency of the cypress and the pine--combined with the

fact that the other trees of Southern Europe which most interest a

stranger from the north, the orange and the lemon, the cork oak, the

ilex, the myrtle, and the laurel, are evergreens--goes far to explain

the beauty of the winter scenery of Italy. Indeed, it is only in the

winter that a tourist who confines himself to wheel-carriages and high

roads can acquire any notion of the face of the earth, and form any

proper geographical image of that country. At other seasons, not high

walls only, but equally impervious hedges, and now, unhappily, acacias

thickly planted along the railway routes, confine the view so

completely, that the arch of a tunnel, or a night-cap over the

traveller's eyes, is scarcely a more effectual obstacle to the

gratification of his curiosity. [Footnote: Besides this, in a country so

diversified in surface as Italy, with the exception of the champaign

region drained by the Po, every new field of view requires either an

extraordinary coup d'oeil in the spectator, or a long study, in order to

master its relief, its plans, its salient and retreating angles. In

summer, except of course in the bare mountains, the universal greenery

confounds light and shade, distance and foreground; and though the

impression upon a traveller, who journeys for the sake of "sensations,"

may be strengthened by the mysterious annihilation of all standards for

the measurement of space, yet the superior intelligibility of the winter

scenery of Italy is more profitable to those who see with a view to

analyze.]

The Forest does not furnish Food for Man.

In a region absolutely covered with trees, human life could not long be

sustained, for want of animal and vegetable food. The depths of the

forest seldom furnish either bulb or fruit suited to the nourishment of

man; and the fowls and beasts on which he feeds are scarcely seen except

upon the margin of the wood, for here only grow the shrubs and grasses,

and here only are found the seeds and insects, which form the sustenance

of the non-carnivorous birds and quadrupeds. [Footnote: Clave, as well as

many earlier writers, supposes that primitive man derived his nutriment

from the spontaneous productions of the wood. "It is to the forests,"

says he, "that man was first indebted for the means of subsistence.

Exposed alone, without defence, to the rigor of the seasons, as well as

to the attacks of animals stronger and swifter than himself, he found in

them his first shelter, drew from them his first weapons. In the first

period of humanity, they provided for all his wants: they furnished him

wood for warmth, fruits for food, garments to cover his nakedness, arms

for his defence."--Etudes sur l'Economie Forestiere, p. 13.

But the history of savage life, as far as it is known to us, presents

man in that condition as inhabiting only the borders of the forest and

the open grounds that skirt the waters and the woods, and as finding

only there the aliments which make up his daily bread. The villages of

the North American Indians were upon the shores of rivers and lakes, and

their weapons and other relics are found only in the narrow open grounds

which they had burned over and cultivated, or in the margin of the woods

around their hamlets.

Except upon the banks of rivers or of lakes, the woods of the interior

of North America, far from the habitations of man, are almost destitute

of animal life. Dr. Newberry, describing the vast forests of the yellow

pine of the West, Pinus ponderosa, remarks: "In the arid and desert

regions of the interior basin, we made whole days' marches in forests of

yellow pine, of which neither the monotony was broken by other forms of

vegetation, nor its stillness by the flutter of a bird or the hum of an

insect."--Pacific Railroad Report, vol. vi., 1857. Dr. Newberry's Report

on Botany, p. 37.

Cheadle and Milton's North-west Passage confirms these statements.

Valvasor says, in a paragraph already quoted, "In my many journeys

through this valley, I did never have sight of so much as a single

bird."

The wild fruit and nut trees, the Canada plum, the cherries, the many

species of walnut, the butternut, the hazel, yield very little,

frequently nothing, so long as they grow in the woods; and it is only

when the trees around them are cut down, or when they grow in pastures,

that they become productive. The berries, too--the strawberry, the

blackberry, the raspberry, the whortleberry, scarcely bear fruit at all

except in cleared ground.

The rank forests of the tropics are as unproductive of human aliment as

the less luxuriant woods of the temperate zone. In Strain's unfortunate

expedition across the great American isthmus, where the journey lay

principally through thick woods, several of the party died of

starvation, and for many days the survivors were forced to subsist on

the scantiest supplies of unnutritious vegetables perhaps never before

employed for food by man. See the interesting account of that expedition

in Harper's Magazine for March, April, and May, 1855.]

First Removal of the Forest.

When multiplying man had filled the open grounds along the margin of the

rivers, the lakes, and the sea, and sufficiently peopled the natural

meadows and savannas of the interior, where such existed, he could find

room for expansion and further growth only by the removal of a portion

of the forest that hemmed him in. The destruction of the woods, then,

was man's first geographical conquest, his first violation of the

harmonies of inanimate nature.

Primitive man had little occasion to fell trees for fuel, or for the

construction of dwellings, boats, and the implements of his rude

agriculture and handicrafts. Windfalls would furnish a thin population

with a sufficient supply of such material, and if occasionally a growing

tree was cut, the injury to the forest would be too insignificant to be

at all appreciable.