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.

The accidental escape and spread of fire or possibly, the combustion of forests by lightning, must have first suggested the advantages to be derived from the removal of too abundant and extensive woods, and at the same time, have pointed out a means by which a large tract of surface could readily be cleared of much of this natural incumbrance. As soon as agriculture had commenced at all, it would be observed that the growth of cultivated plants, as well as of many species of wild vegetation, was particularly rapid and luxuriant on soils which had been burned over, and thus a new stimulus would be given to the practice of destroying the woods by fire, as a means of both extending the open grounds, and making the acquisition of a yet more productive soil. After a few harvests had exhausted the first rank fertility of this virgin mould, or when weeds and briers and the sprouting roots of the trees had begun to choke the crops of the half-subdued soil, the ground would be abandoned for new fields won from the forest by the same means, and the deserted plain or hillock would soon clothe itself anew with shrubs and trees, to be again subjected to the same destructive process, and again surrendered to the restorative powers of vegetable nature. [Footnote: In many parts of the North American States, the first white settlers found extensive tracts of thin woods, of a very park-like character, called "oak-openings," from the predominance of different species of that tree upon them. These were the semi-artificial pasture-grounds of the Indians, brought into that state, and so kept, by partial clearing, and by the annual burning of the grass. The object of this operation was to attract the deer to the fresh herbage which sprang up after the fire. The oaks bore the annual scorching at least for a certain time; but if it had been indefinitely continued, they would very probably have been destroyed at last. The soil would have then been much in the prairie condition, and would have needed nothing but grazing for a long succession of years to make the resemblance perfect. That the annual fires alone occasioned the peculiar character of the oak-openings, is proved by the fact that as soon as the Indians had left the country, young trees of many species sprang up and grew luxuriantly upon them. See a very interesting account of the oak-openings in Dwight s Travels, iv., pp. 58-63. This rude economy would be continued for generations, and, wasteful as it is, is still largely pursued in Northern Sweden, Swedish Lapland, and sometimes even in France and the United States. [Footnote: The practice of burning over woodland, at once to clear and manure the ground, is called in Swedieh svedjande, a participial noun from the verb att svedja, to burn over. Though used in Sweden as a preparation for crops of rye or other grain, it is employed in Lapland more frequently to secure an abundant growth of pasturage, which follows in two or three years after the fire; and it is sometimes resorted to as a mode of driving the Laplanders and their reindeer from the vicinity of the Swedish backwoodsman's grass-grounds and hay-stacks, to which they are dangerous neighbors. The forest, indeed, rapidly recovers itself, but it is a generation or more before the reindeer-moss grows again. When the forest consists of pine, tall, the ground, instead of being rendered fertile by this process, becomes hopelessly barren, and for a long time afterwards produces nothing but weeds and briers.—Laestadius, Om Uppodlingar i Lappmarken, p. 15. See also Schubert, Resa i Sverge, ii., p. 375.

In some parts of France this practice is so general that Clave says: "In the department of Ardennes it (le sartage) is the basis of agriculture."]

Principal Causes of the Destruction of the Forest.

The needs of agriculture are the most familiar cause of the destruction of the forest in new countries; for not only does an increasing population demand additional acres to grow the vegetables which feed it and its domestic animals, but the slovenly husbandry of the border settler soon exhausts the luxuriance of his first fields, and compels him to remove his household gods to a fresher soil. The extent of cleared ground required for agricultural use depends very much on the number and kinds of the cattle bred. We have seen, in a former chapter, that, in the United States, the domestic quadrupeds amount to more than a hundred millions, or nearly three times the number of the human population of the Union. In many of the Western States, the swine subsist more or less on acorns, nuts, and other products of the woods, and the prairies, or natural meadows of the Mississippi valley, yield a large amount of food for beast, as well as for man. With these exceptions, all this vast army of quadrupeds is fed wholly on grass, grain, pulse, and roots grown on soil reclaimed from the forest by European settlers. It is true that the flesh of domestic quadrupeds enters very largely into the aliment of the American people, and greatly reduces the quantity of vegetable nutriment which they would otherwise consume, so that a smaller amount of agricultural product is required for immediate human food, and, of course, a smaller extent of cleared land is needed for the growth of that product, than if no domestic animals existed. But the flesh of the horse, the ass, and the mule is not consumed by man, and the sheep is reared rather for its fleece than for food. Besides this, the ground required to produce the grass and grain consumed in rearing and fattening a grazing quadruped, would yield a far larger amount of nutriment, if devoted to the growing of breadstuffs, than is furnished by his flesh; and, upon the whole, whatever advantages may be reaped from the breeding of domestic cattle, it is plain that the cleared land devoted to their sustenance in the originally wooded part of the United States, after deducting a quantity sufficient to produce an amount of aliment equal to their flesh, still greatly exceeds that cultivated for vegetables, directly consumed by the people of the same regions; or, to express a nearly equivalent idea in other words, the meadow and the pasture, taken together, much exceed the ploughland. [Footnote: The two ideas expressed in the text are not exactly equivalent, because, though the consumption of animal food diminishes the amount of vegetable aliment required for human use, yet the animals themselves consume a great quantity of grain and roots grown on ground ploughed and cultivated as regularly and as laboriously as any other.

The 280,000,000 bushels of oats raised in the United States in 1870, and fed to the 7,000,000 horses, the potatoes, the turnips, and the maize employed in fattening the oxen, the sheep, and the swine slaughtered the same year, occupied an extent of ground which, cultivated by hand-labor and with Chinese industry and skill, would probably have produced a quantity of vegetable food equal in alimentary power to the flesh of the quadrupeds killed for domestic use. Hence, so far as the naked question of AMOUNT of aliment is concerned, the meadows and the pastures might as well have remained in the forest condition. It must, however, be borne in mind that animal labor, if not a necessary, is probably an economical, force in agricultural occupations, and that without animal manure many branches of husbandry could hardly be carried on at all. At the same time, the introduction of machinery into rural industry, and of artificial, mineral, and fossil manures, is working great revolutions, and we may find at some future day that the ox is no longer necessary as a help to the farmer.]

Governments and military commanders have at different periods deliberately destroyed forests by fire or the axe, because they afforded a retreat to robbers, outlaws, or enemies, and this was one of the hostile measures practised by both Julius Caesar and the Gauls in the Roman war of conquest against that people. It was also resorted to in the Mediterranean provinces of France, then much infested by robbers and deserters, as late as the reign of Napoleon I., and is said to have been employed by the early American colonists in their exterminating wars with the native Indians. [Footnote: For many instances of this sort, see Maury, Les Forets de la Gaule, pp. 3-5, and Becquerel, Des Climats, etc., pp. 301-303. In 1664 the Swedes made an incursion into Jutland and felled a considerable extent of forest. After they retired, a survey of the damage was had, and the report is still extant. The number of trees cut was found to be 120,000, and as an account was taken of the numbers of each species of tree, the document is of much interest in the history of the forest, as showing the relative proportions between the different trees which at that time composed the wood. See Vaupell, Bogens Indvandring, p. 35, and Notes, p. 55.]

In the Middle Ages, as well as in earlier and later centuries, attempts have been made to protect the woods by law, [Footnote: Stanley, quoting Selden, De Jure Naturali, lib. vi., and Fabricius, Cod. Psedap., V. T., i. 874, mentions a noteworthy Hebrew tradition of uncertain date, but unquestionably very ancient, which is one of the oldest proofs of a public respect for the woods.

"A Hebrew tradition attributes to Joshua ten statutes, containing precise regulations for the protection of the property of every tribe and of every head of a family against irregular depredations. Small quadrupeds were allowed to pasture in dense woods, not in thin ones; but no animal could feed in any forest without the consent of the proprietor of the soil. Every Hebrew might pick up fallen boughs and twigs, but was not permitted to cut them. Trees might be pruned for the trimmings, with the exception of the olive and other fruit-trees, and provided there was sufficient shade in the place."—Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church, part i., p. 271.

Alfred Maury mentions several provisions taken from the laws of the Indian legislator Manu, on the same subject.—Les Forets de la Gaule, p. 9.

The very ancient Tables of Heracles contain provisions for the protection of woods, but whether these referred only to sacred groves, to public forests, or to leased lands, is not clear.] as necessary for the breeding of deer, wild boars, and other game, or for the more reasonable purpose of furnishing a supply of building timber and fuel for future generations. It was reserved for more advanced ages to appreciate the geographical importance of the woods, and it is only in the most recent times, only in a few countries of Europe, that the general destruction of the forests has been recognized as the most potent among the many causes of the physical deterioration of the earth. [Footnote: We must perhaps make an exception in favor of the Emperor Constantine, who commenced the magnificent series of aqueducts and cisterns which still supply Constantinople with water, and enacted strict laws for the protection of the forest of Belgrade, in which rise the springs that feed the aqueducts. See an article by Mr. H. A. Homes on the Water-Supply of Constantinople in the Albany Argus of June 6, 1872.]

Royal Forests and Game Laws.

The French authors I have quoted, as well as many other writers of the same nation, refer to the French Revolution as having given a new impulse to destructive causes which were already threatening the total extermination of the woods. [Footnote: Religious intolerance had produced similar effects in France at an earlier period. "The revocation of the edict of Nantes and the dragonnades occasioned the sale of the forests of the unhappy Protestants, who fled to seek in foreign lands the liberty of conscience which was refused to them in France. The forests were soon felled by the purchasers, and the soil in part brought under cultivation."—Becquerel, Des Climats, etc, p. 303.] The general crusade against the forests, which accompanied that important event, is to be ascribed, in a considerable degree, to political resentments. The forest codes of the mediaeval kings, and the local "coutumes" of feudalism, contained many severe and even inhuman provisions, adopted rather for the preservation of game than from any enlightened views of the more important functions of the woods. Ordericus Vitalis informs us that William the Conqueror destroyed sixty parishes and drove out their inhabitants, in order that he might turn their lands into a forest, [Footnote: The American reader must be reminded that, in the language of the chase and of the English law, a "forest" is not necessarily a wood. Any large extent of ground, withdrawn from cultivation, reserved for the pleasures of the chase, and allowed to clothe itself with a spontaneous growth, serving as what is technically called "cover" for wild animals, is, in the dialects I have mentioned, a forest. When, therefore, the Norman kings afforested the grounds referred to in the text, it is not to be supposed that they planted them with trees, though the protection afforded to them by the game laws would, if cattle had been kept out, soon have converted them into real woods.] to be reserved as a hunting-ground for himself and his posterity, and he punished with death the killing of a deer, wild boar, or even a hare. His successor, William Rufus, according to the Histoire des Ducs de Normandie et des Rois d'Angleterre, p. 67, "was hunting one day in a new forest, which he had caused to be made out of eighteen parishes that he had destroyed, when, by mischance, he was killed by an arrow wherewith Tyreus de Rois [Sir Walter Tyrell] thought to slay a beast, but missed the beast, and slew the king, who was beyond it. And in this very same forest, his brother Richard ran so hard against a tree that he died of it. And men commonly said that these things were because they had so laid waste and taken the said parishes."

These barbarous acts, as Bonnemere observes, [Footnote: Histoire des Paysans, ii., p. 190. The work of Bonnemere is of great value to those who study the history of mediaeval Europe from a desire to know its real character, and not in the hope of finding apparent facts to sustain a false and dangerous theory. Bonnemere is one of the few writers who, like Michelet, have been honest enough and bold enough to speak the truth with regard to the relations between the church and the people in the Middle Ages.] were simply the transfer of the customs of the French kings, of their vassals, and even of inferior gentlemen, to conquered England. "The death of a hare," says our author, "was a hanging matter, the murder of a plover a capital crime. Death was inflicted on those who spread nets for pigeons; wretches who had drawn a bow upon a stag were to be tied to the animal alive; and among the seigniors it was a standing excuse for having killed game on forbidden ground, that they aimed at a serf." The feudal lords enforced these codes with unrelenting rigor, and not unfrequently took the law into their own hands. In the time of Louis IX., according to William of Nangis, "three noble children, born in Flanders, who were sojourning at the abbey of St. Nicholas in the Wood, to learn the speech of France, went out into the forest of the abbey, with their bows and iron-headed arrows, to disport them in shooting hares, chased the game, which they had started in the wood of the abbey, into the forest of Enguerrand, lord of Coucy, and were taken by the sergeants which kept the wood. When the fell and pitiless Sir Enguerrand knew this, he had the children straightway hanged without any manner of trial." [Footnote: It is painful to add that a similar outrage was perpetrated a very few years ago, in one of the European states, by a prince of a family now dethroned. In this case, however, the prince killed the trespasser with his own hand, his sergeants refusing to execute his mandate.] The matter being brought to the notice of good King Louis, Sir Enguerrand was summoned to appear, and, finally, after many feudal shifts and dilatory pleas, brought to trial before Louis himself and a special council. Notwithstanding the opposition of the other seigniors, who, it is needless to say, spared no efforts to save a peer, probably not a greater criminal than themselves, the king was much inclined to inflict the punishment of death on the proud baron. "If he believed," said he, "that our Lord would be as well content with hanging as with pardoning, he would hang Sir Enguerrand in spite of all his barons;" but noble and clerical interests unfortunately prevailed. The king was persuaded to inflict a milder retribution, and the murderer was condemned to pay ten thousand livres in coin, and to "build for the souls of the three children two chapels wherein mass should be said every day." [Footnote: Guillame De Nangis, as quoted in the notes to Joinville, Nouvelle Collection des Memoires, etc., par Michaud et Poujoulat, premiere serie, i., p. 335. Persons acquainted with the character and influence of the mediaeval clergy will hardly need to be informed that the ten thousand livres never found their way to the royal exchequer. It was easy to prove to the simple-minded king that, as the profits of sin were a monopoly of the church, he ought not to derive advantage from the commission of a crime by one of his subjects; and the priests were cunning enough both to secure to themselves the amount of the fine, and to extort from Louis large additional grants to carry out the purposes to which they devoted the money. "And though the king did take the moneys," says the chronicler, "he put them not into his treasury, but turned them into good works; for he builded therewith the maison-Dieu of Pontoise, and endowed the same with rents and lands; also the schools and the dormitory of the friars preachers of Paris, and the monastery of the Minorite friars."] The hope of shortening the purgatorial term of the young persons, by the religious rites to be celebrated in the chapels, was doubtless the consideration which operated most powerfully on the mind of the king; and Europe lost a great example for the sake of a mass.

The desolation and depopulation, resulting from the extension of the forest and the enforcement of the game laws, induced several of the French kings to consent to some relaxation of the severity of these latter. Francis I., however, revived their barbarous provisions, and, according to Bonnemere, even so good a monarch as Henry IV. re-enacted them, and "signed the sentence of death upon peasants guilty of having defended their fields against devastation by wild beasts." "A fine of twenty livres," he continues, "was imposed on every one shooting at pigeons, which, at that time, swooped down by thousands upon the new-sown fields and devoured the seed. But let us count even this a progress, for we have seen that the murder of a pigeon had been a capital crime." [Footnote: Histoire des Paysans, ii., p. 200.]

Not only were the slightest trespasses on the forest domain—the cutting of an oxgoad, for instance—severely punished, but game animals were still sacred when they had wandered from their native precincts and were ravaging the fields of the peasantry. A herd of deer or of wild boars often consumed or trod down a harvest of grain, the sole hope of the year for a whole family; and the simple driving out of such animals from this costly pasturage brought dire vengeance on the head of the rustic, who had endeavored to save his children's bread from their voracity. "At all times," says Paul Louis Courier, speaking in the name of the peasants of Chambord, in the "Simple Discours," "the game has made war upon us. Paris was blockaded eight hundred years by the deer, and its environs, now so rich, so fertile, did not yield bread enough to support the gamekeepers." [Footnote: The following details from Bonnemere will serve to give a more complete idea of the vexatious and irritating nature of the game laws of France. The officers of the chase went so far as to forbid the pulling up of thistles and weeds, or the mowing of any unenclosed ground before St. John's day (24th June), in order that the nests of game birds might not be disturbed. It was unlawful to fence-in any grounds in the plains where royal residences were situated; thorns were ordered to be planted in all fields of wheat, barley, or oats, to prevent the use of ground-nets for catching the birds which consumed, or were believed to consume, the grain, and it was forbidden to cut or pull stubble before the first of October, lest the partridge and the quail might be deprived of their cover. For destroying the eggs of the quail, a fine of one hundred livres was imposed for the first offence, double that amount for the second, and for the third the culprit was flogged and banished for five years to a distance of six leagues from the forest.—Histoire des Paysans, ii., p. 202, text and notes.

Neither these severe penalties, nor any provisions devised by the ingenuity of modern legislation, have been able effectually to repress poaching. "The game laws," says Clave, "have not delivered us from the poachers, who kill twenty times as much game as the sportsmen. In the forest of Fontainebleau, as in all those belonging to the state, poaching is a very common and a very profitable offence. It is in vain that the gamekeepers are on the alert night and day, they cannot prevent it. Those who follow the trade begin by carefully studying the habits of the game. They will lie motionless on the ground, by the roadside or in thickets, for whole days, watching the paths most frequented by the animals," etc.—Revue des Deux Mondes, Mai, 1863, p. 160.

The writer adds many details on this subject, and it appears that, as there are "beggars on horseback" in South America, there are poachers in carriages in France.] The Tiers Etat declared, in 1789, "the most terrible scourge of agriculture is the abundance of wild game, a consequence of the privileges of the chase; the fields are wasted, the forests ruined, and the vines gnawed down to the roots."

Effects of the French Revolution.

The abrogation of the game laws and of the harsh provisions of the forestal code was one of the earliest measures of the revolutionary government; and the removal of the ancient restrictions on the chase and of the severe penalties imposed on trespassers upon the public forests, was immediately followed by unbridled license in the enjoyment of the newly conceded rights.

In the popular mind the forest was associated with all the abuses of feudalism, and the evils the peasantry had suffered from the legislation which protected both it and the game it sheltered, blinded them to the still greater physical mischiefs which its destruction was to entail upon them. No longer under the safeguard of the law, the crown forests and those of the great lords were attacked with relentless fury, unscrupulously plundered and wantonly laid waste, and even the rights of property in small private woods ceased to be respected. [Footnote: "Whole trees were sacrificed for the most insignificant purposes; the peasants would cut down two firs to make a single pair of wooden shoes."—Michelet, as quoted by Clave. Etudes, p. 24.

A similar wastefulness formerly prevailed in Russia, though not from the same cause. In St. Pierre's time, the planks brought to St. Petersburg were not sawn, but hewn with the axe, and a tree furnished but a single plank.] Various absurd theories, some of which are not even yet exploded, were propagated with regard to the economical advantages of converting the forest into pasture and plough-land, the injurious effects of the woods upon climate, health, facility of internal communication, and the like. Thus resentful memory of the wrongs associated with the forest, popular ignorance, and the cupidity of speculators cunning enough to turn these circumstances to profitable account, combined to hasten the sacrifice of the remaining woods, and a waste was produced which hundreds of years and millions of treasure will hardly repair.

In the era of savage anarchy which followed the beneficent reforms of 1789, economical science was neglected, and statistical details upon the amount of the destruction of woods during that period are wanting. But it is known to have been almost incalculably rapid, and the climatic and financial evils, which elsewhere have been a more gradual effect of this cause, began to make themselves felt in France within three or four years after that memorable epoch. [Footnote: See Becquerel, Memoire sur les Forets, in the Mem. de l'Academie des Sciences, c. XXXV., p. 411 et seqq.

Similar circumstances produced a like result, though on a far smaller scale, in Italy, at a very recent period. Gallenga says: "The destruction of the majestic timber [between the Vals Sesia and Sessera] dates no farther back than 1848, when, on the first proclamation of the Constitution, the ignorant boor had taken it for granted that all the old social ties would be loosened, and therefore the old forest-laws should be at once set at naught."—Country Life in Piedmont, p. 136.]

Increased Demand for Lumber.

With increasing population and the development of new industries, come new drains upon the forest from the many arts for which wood is the material. The demands of the near and the distant market for this product excite the cupidity of the hardy forester, and a few years of that wild industry of which Springer's "Forest Life and Forest Trees" so vividly depicts the dangers and the triumphs, suffice to rob the most inaccessible glens of their fairest ornaments. The value of timber increases with its dimensions in almost geometrical proportion, and the tallest, most vigorous, and most symmetrical trees fall the first sacrifice. This is a fortunate circuinritiinco for the remainder of the wood; for the impatient lumberman contents himself with felling a few of the best trees, and then hurries on to take his tithe of still virgin groves.

The vast extension of railroads, of manufactures and the mechanical arts, of military armaments, and especially of the commercial fleets and navies of Christendom, within the present century, has incredibly augmented the demand for wood, [Footnote: Let us take the supply of timber for railroad-ties. According to Clave (p. 248), France had, in 1862, 9,000 kilometres of railway in operation, 7,000 in construction, half of which is built with a double track. Adding turn-outs and extra tracks at stations, the number of ties required for a single track is stated at 1,200 to the kilometre, or, as Clave computes, for the entire network of France, 58,000,000. This number is too large, for 16,000 + 8,000 for the double track halfway = 24,000, and 24,000 x 1,200 = 28,800,000. In an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July, 1863, Gandy states that 2,000,000 trees had been felled to furnish the ties for the French railroads, and as the ties must be occasionally renewed, and new railways have been constructed since 1863, we may probably double this number.

The United States had in operation on the first of January, 1872, 61,000 miles, or about 97,000 kilometres, of railroad. Allowing the same proportion as in France, the American railroads required 116,400,000 ties. The Report of the Agricultural Department of the United States for November and December, 1869, estimates the number of ties annually required for our railways at 30,000,000, and supposes that 150,000 acres of the best woodland must be felled to supply this number. This is evidently an error, perhaps a misprint for 15,000. The same authority calculates the annual expenditure of the American railroads for lumber for buildings, repairs, and cars, at $38,000,000, and for locomotive fuel, at the rate of 10,000 cords of wood per day, at $50,000,000.

The walnut trees cut in Italy and France to furnish gunstocks to the American army, during our late civil war, would alone have formed a considerable forest. A single establishment in Northern Italy used twenty-eight thousand large walnut trees for that purpose in the years 1862 and 1863.

The consumption of wood for lucifer matches is enormous, and I have heard of several instances where tracts of pine forest, hundreds and even thousands of acres in extent, have been purchased and felled, solely to supply timber for this purpose. The United States government tax, at one cent per hundred, produces $2,000,000 per year, which shows a manufacture of 20,000,000,000 matches. Allowing nothing for waste, there are about fifty matches to the cubic inch of wood, or 86,400 to the cubic foot, making in all upwards of 230,000 cubic feet, and, as only straight-grained wood, free from knots, can be used for this purpose, the sacrifice of not less than three or four thousand well-grown pines is required for this purpose.

If we add to all this the supply of wood for telegraph-posts, wooden pavements, wooden wall tapestry-paper, shoe-pegs, and even wooden nails, which have lately come into use—not to speak of numerous other recent applications of this material which American ingenuity has devised—we have an amount of consumption, for entirely new purposes, which is really appalling.

Wooden field and garden fences are very generally used in America, and some have estimated the consumption of wood for this purpose as not less than that for architectural uses.

Fully one-half our vast population is lodged in wooden houses, and barns and country out-houses of all descriptions are almost universally of the same material.

The consumption of wood in the United States as fuel for domestic purposes, for charcoal, for brick and lime kilns, for breweries and distilleries, for steamboats, and many other uses, defies computation, and is vastly greater than is employed in Europe for the same ends. For instance, in rural Switzerland, cold as is the winter climate, the whole supply of wood for domestic fires, dairies, breweries, distilleries, brick and lime kilns, fences, furniture, tools, and even house-building and small smitheries, exclusive of the small quantity derived from the trimmings of fruit-trees, grape-vines, and hedges, and from decayed fences and buildings, does not exceed TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY CUBIC FEET, or less than two cords a year, per household.—See Bericht uber die Untersuchung der Schweiz Hochgebirgswaldungen, pp. 85-89. In 1789, Arthur Young estimated the annual consumption of firewood by single families in France at from two and a half to ten Paris cords of 134 cubic feet.—Travels, vol. ii., chap. xv.

The report of the Commissioners on the Forests of Wisconsin, 1867, allows three cords of wood to each person for household fires alone. Taking families at an average of five persons, we have eight times the amount consumed by an equal number of persons in Switzerland for this and all other purposes to which this material in ordinarily applicable. I do not think the consumption in the North-eastern States is at all less than the calculation for Wisconsin. Evergreen trees are often destroyed in immense numbers in the United States for the purpose of decoration of churches and on other festive occasions. The New York city papers reported that 113,000 young evergreen trees, besides 20,000 yards of small branches twirled into festoons, were sold in the markets of that city, for this use, at Christmas, in 1869. At the Cincinnati Industrial Exhibition of 1873, three miles of evergreen festoons were hung upon the beams and rafters of the "Floral Hall."

Important statistics on the consumption and supply of wood in the United States will be found in a valuable paper by the Rev. Frederick Starr, Jr., in the Transactions of the Agricultural Society for—.

Of course, there is a vast consumption of ligneous material for all these uses in Europe, but it is greatly less than at earlier periods. The waste of wood in European carpentry was formerly enormous, the beams of houses being both larger and more numerous than permanence or stability required. In examining the construction of the houses occupied by the eighty families which inhabit the village of Faucigny, in Savoy, in 1854, the forest inspector found that FIFTY THOUSAND trees had been employed in building them. The builders "seemed," says Hudry-Menos, "to have tried to solve the problem of piling upon the walls the largest quantity of timber possible without crushing them."—Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st June, 1864, p. 601.

European statistics present comparatively few facts on this subject, of special interest to American readers, but it is worth noting that France employs 1,500,000 cubic feet of oak per year for brandy and wine casks, which is about half her annual consumption of that material; and it is not a wholly insignificant fact that, according to Rentzach, the quantity of wood used in parts of Germany for small carvings and for children's toys is so largs, that the export of such objects from the town of Sonneberg alone, amounted, in 1853, to 60,000 centner, or three thousand tons' weight.—Der Wald, p. 68.

In an article in the Revue des Eaux et Forets for November, 1868, it is stated that 200,000 dozens of drums for boys aro manufactured per month in Paris. This is equivalent to 28,800,000 per year, for which 56,000,000 drumsticks are required, and the writer supposes that the annual growth of 50,000 acres of woodland would not more than supply the material. In the same article the consumption of matches in France is given at 7,200,000,000, and the quantity of lumber annually required for this manufacture is computed at 80,000 steres, or cubic metres—evidently an erroneous calculation.] and but for improvements in metallurgy and the working of iron, which have facilitated the substitution of that metal for wood, the last twenty-five years would have almost stripped Europe of her last remaining tree fit for these uses. [Footnote: Besides the substitution of iron for wood, a great saving of consumption of this latter material has been effected by the revival of ancient methods of increasing its durability, and the invention of new processes for the same purpose. The most effectual preservative yet discovered for wood employed on land, is sulphate of copper, a solution of which is introduced into the pores of the wood while green, by soaking, by forcing-pumps, or, most economically, by the simple pressure of a column of the fluid in a small pipe connected with the end of the piece of timber subjected to the treatment. Clave (Etudes Forestieres, pp. 240-249) gives an interesting account of the various processes employed for rendering wood imperishable, and states that railroad-ties injected with sulphate of copper in 1846, were found absolutely unaltered in 1855; and telegraphic posts prepared two years earlier, are now in a state of perfect preservation.

For many purposes, the method of injection is too expensive, and some simpler process is much to be desired. The question of the proper time of felling timber is not settled, and the best modes of air, water, and steam seasoning are not yet fully ascertained. Experiments on these subjects would be well worth the patronage of Governments in new countries, where they can be very easily made, without the necessity of much waste of valuable material, and without expensive arrangements for observation.

The practice of stripping living trees of their bark some years before they are felled, is as old as the time of Vitruvius, but is much less followed than it deserves, partly because the timber of trees so treated inclines to crack and split, and partly because it becomes so hard as to be wrought with considerable difficulty.

In America, economy in the consumption of fuel has been much promoted by the substitution of coal for wood, the general use of stoves both for wood and coal, and recently by the employment of anthracite in the furnaces of stationary and locomotive steam-engines. All the objections to the use of anthracite for this latter purpose appear to have been overcome, and the improvements in its combustion have been attended with a great pecuniary saving, and with much advantage to the preservation of the woods.

The employment of coal has produced a great reduction in the consumption of firewood in Paris. In 1815, the supply of firewood for the city required 1,200,000 steres, or cubic metres; in 1859 it had fallen to 501,805, while, in the meantime, the consumption of coal had risen from 600,000 to 4,320,000 metrical quintals. See Clave, Etudes, p. 212.

In 1869 Paris consumed 951,157 steres of firewood, 4,902,414 hectolitres, or more than 13,000,000 bushels, of charcoal, and 6,872,000 metrical quintals, or more than 7,000,000 tons of mineral coal.—Annuaire de la Revue des Eaux et Forets for 1872, p. 26.

The increase in the price of firewood at Paris, within a century, has been comparatively small, while that of timber and of sawed lumber has increased enormously.] I have spoken of the foreign demand for American agricultural products as having occasioned an extension of cultivated ground, which had led to clearing land not required by the necessities of home consumption. But the forest itself has become, so to speak, an article of exportation. England, as we have seen, imported oak and pine from the Baltic ports more than six hundred years ago. She has since drawn largely on the forests of Norway, and for many years has received vast quantities of lumber from her American possessions.

The unparalleled facilities for internal navigation, afforded by the numerous rivers of the present and former British colonial possessions in North America, have proved very fatal to the forests of that continent. Quebec became many years ago a centre for a lumber trade, which, in the bulk of its material, and, consequently, in the tonnage required for its transportation, rivalled the commerce of the greatest European cities. Immense rafts were collected at Quebec from the great Lakes, from the Ottawa, and from all the other tributaries which unite to swell the current of the St. Lawrence and help it to struggle against its mighty tides. [Footnote: The tide rises at Quebec to the height of twenty-five feet, and when it is aided by a north-east wind, it flows with almost irresistible violence. Rafts containing several hundred thousand cubic feet of timber are often caught by the flood-tide, torn to pieces, and dispersed for miles along the shores.] Ships, of burden formerly undreamed of, have been built to convey the timber to the markets of Europe, and during the summer months the St. Lawrence is almost as crowded with shipping as the Thames. [Footnote: One of these, the Baron of Renfrew—so named from one of the titles of the kings of England—built forty or fifty years ago, measured 5,000 tons. They were little else than rafts, being almost solid masses of timber designed to be taken to pieces and sold as lumber on arriving at their port of destination.

The lumber trade at Quebec is still very large. According to an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, that city exported, in 1860, 30,000,000 cubic feet of squared timber, and 400,000,000 square feet of "planches." The thickness of the boards is not stated, but I believe they are generally cut an inch and a quarter thick for the Quebec trade, and as they shrink somewhat in drying, we may estimate ten square for one cubic foot of boards. This gives a total of 70,000,000 cubic feet. The specific gravity of white pine is .554, and the weight of this quantity of lumber, very little of which is thoroughly seasoned, would exceed a million of tons, even supposing it to consist wholly of wood as light as pine.

The London Times of Oct. 10, 1871, states the exportation of lumber from Canada to Europe, in 1870, at 200,000,000 cubic feet, and adds that more than three times that quantity was sent from the same province to the United States. A very large proportion of this latter quantity goes to Burlington, Vermont, whence it is distributed to other parts of the Union.

There must, I think, be some error or exaggeration in these figures. Perhaps instead of cubic feet we should read square feet. Two hundred millions of cubic feet of timber would require more than half the entire tonnage of England for its transportation.

I suppose the quantities in the following estimates, from a carefully prepared article in the St. Louis Republican, must be understood as meaning square or superficial feet, board measure, allowing a thickness of one inch:

"The lumber trade of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, for the year 1869, shows the amount cut as being 2,029,372,255 feet for the State of Michigan, and 317,400,000 feet for the State of Minnesota, and 964,600,000 feet for the State of Wisconsin. This includes the lake shore and the whole State of Wisconsin, which heretofore has been difficult to get a report from. The total amount cut in these States was 3,311,372,255 feet, and that to obtain this quantity there have been shipped 883,032 acres, or 1,380 square miles of pine have been removed. It is calculated that 4,000,000 acres of land still remain unstripped in Michigan, which will yield 15,000,000,000 feet of lumber; while 3,000,000 acres arc still standing in Wisconsin, which will yield 11,250,000,000 feet, and that which remains in Minnesota, taking the estimate of a few years since of that which was surveyed and unexplored, after deducting the amount cut the past few years, we find 3,630,000 acres to be the proper estimate of trees now standing which will yield 32,362,500,000 feet of lumber. This makes a total of 15,630,000 acres of pine lands, which remain standing in the above States, that will yield 58,612,500,000 feet of lumber, and it is thought that fifteen or twenty years will be required to cut and send to market the trees now standing."

See also Bryant, Forest Trees, chap. iv.]

Effects of Forest Fires.

The operations of the lumberman involve other dangers to the woods besides the loss of the trees felled by him. The narrow clearings around his shanties form openings which let in the wind, and thus sometimes occasion the overthrow of thousands of trees, the fall of which dams up small streams, and creates bogs by the spreading of the waters, while the decaying trunks facilitate the multiplication of the insects which breed in dead wood and are, some of them, injurious to living trees. The escape and spread of camp-fires, however, is the most devastating of all the causes of destruction that find their origin in the operations of the lumberman. The proportion of trees fit for industrial uses is small in all primitive woods. Only these fall before the forester's axe, but the fire destroys, almost indiscriminately, every age and every species of tree. [Footnote: Trees differ in their power of resisting the action of forest fires. Different woods vary greatly in combustibility, and even when the bark is scarcely scorched, trees are, partly in consequence of physiological character, and partly from the greater or less depth at which their roots habitually lie below the surface, differently affected by running fires. The white pine, Pinus strobus, as it is the most valuable, is also perhaps the most delicate tree of the American forest, while its congener, the Northern pitch-pine, Pinus rigida, is less injured by fire than any other tree of that country. I have heard experienced lumbermen maintain that the growth of this pine was even accelerated by a fire brisk enough to destroy all other trees, and I have myself seen it still flourishing after a conflagration which had left not a green leaf but its own in the wood, and actually throwing out fresh foliage, when the old had been quite burnt off and the bark almost converted into charcoal. The wood of the pitch-pine is of comparatively little value for the joiner, but it is useful for very many purposes. Its rapidity of growth in even poor soils, its hardihood, and its abundant yield of resinous products, entitle it to much more consideration, as a plantation tree, than it has hitherto received in Europe or America.]

While, then, without fatal injury to the younger growths, the native forest will bear several "cuttings over" in a generation—for the increasing value of lumber brings into use, every four or five years, a quality of timber which had been before rejected as unmarketable—a fire may render the declivity of a mountain unproductive for a century. [Footnote: Between sixty and seventy years ago, a steep mountain with which I am familiar, composed of metamorphic rock, and at that time covered with a thick coating of soil and a dense primeval forest, was accidentally burnt over. The fire took place in a very dry season, the slope of the mountain was too rapid to retain much water, and the conflagration was of an extraordinarily fierce character, consuming the wood almost entirely, burning the leaves and combustible portion of the mould, and in the many places cracking and disintegrating the rock beneath. The rains of the following autumn carried off much of the remaining soil, and the mountain-side was nearly bare of wood for two or three years afterwards. At length a new crop of trees sprang up and grew vigorously, and the mountain is now thickly covered again. But the depth of mould and earth is too small to allow the trees to reach maturity. When they attain to the diameter of about six inches, they uniformly die, and this they will no doubt continue to do until the decay of leaves and wood on the surface, and the decomposition of the subjacent rock, shall have formed, perhaps hundreds of years hence, a stratum of soil thick enough to support a full-grown forest. Under favorable conditions, however, as in the case of the fire of Miramichi, a burnt forest renews itself rapidly and permanently.]

Aside from the destruction of the trees and the laying bare of the soil, and consequently the freer admission of sun, rain, and air to the ground, the fire of itself exerts an important influence on its texture and condition. It cracks and sometimes even pulverizes the rocks and stones upon and near the surface; [Footnote: In the burning over of a hill-forest in the Lower Engadine, in September, 1865, the fire was intense as to shatter and calcine the rocks on the slope, and their fragments were precipitated into the valley below.—Ricista Firrestate del Regna d'Italia, Ottobro, 1865, 1865, p. 474.] it consumes a portion of the half-decayed vegetable mould which served to hold its mineral particles together and to retain the water of precipitation, and thus loosens, pulverizes, and dries the earth; it destroys reptiles, insects, and worms, with their eggs, and the seeds of trees and of smaller plants; it supplies, in the ashes which it deposits on the surface, important elements for the growth of a new forest clothing, as well as of the usual objects of agricultural industry; and by the changes thus produced, it fits the ground for the reception of a vegetation different in character from that which had spontaneously covered it. These new conditions help to explain the natural succession of forest crops, so generally observed in all woods cleared by fire and then abandoned. There is no doubt, however, that other influences contribute to the same result, because effects more or less analogous follow when the trees are destroyed by other causes, as by high winds, by the woodman's axe, and even by natural decay. [Footnote: The remarkable mounds and other earthworks constructed in the valley of the Ohio and elsewhere in the territory of the United States, by a people apparently more advanced in the culture than the modern Indian, were overgrown with a dense clothing of forest when first discovered by the whites. But though the ground where they were erected must have been occupied by a large population for a considerable leagth of time, and therefore entirely cleared, the trees which grew upon the ancient fortresses and the adjacent lands were not distinguishable in species, or even in dimensions and character of growth, from the neighboring forests, where the soil seemed never to have been disturbed. This apparent exception to the law of change of crop in natured forest growth was ingeniously explained by General Harrison's suggestion, that the lapse of time since the era of the mound-builders was so great as to have embraced several successive generations of trees, and occasioned, by their rotation, a return to the original vegetation.