Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action

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.[249]

These descriptions, it will be noticed, apply to trees cut from sixty to one hundred 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 six, and sometimes even seven 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.[250]

Another evil, sometimes of serious magnitude, which attends the operations of the lumberman, is the injury to the banks of rivers from the practice of floating. I do not here allude to rafts, which, being under the control of those who navigate them, may be so guided as to avoid damage to the shore, but to masts, logs, and other pieces of timber singly intrusted to the streams, to be conveyed by their currents to sawmill ponds, or to convenient places for collecting them into rafts. The lumbermen usually haul the timber to the banks of the rivers in the winter, and when the spring floods swell the streams and break up the ice, they roll the logs into the water, leaving them to float down to their destination. If the transporting stream is too small to furnish a sufficient channel for this rude navigation, it is sometimes dammed up, and the timber collected in the pond thus formed above the dam. When the pond is full, a sluice is opened, or the dam is blown up or otherwise suddenly broken, and the whole mass of lumber above it is hurried down with the rolling flood. Both of these modes of proceeding expose the banks of the rivers employed as channels of flotation to abrasion,[251] and in some of the American States it has been found necessary to protect, by special legislation, the lands through which they flow from the serious injury sometimes received through the practices I have described.[252]

Special Causes of the Destruction of European Woods.

The causes of forest waste thus far enumerated are more or less common to both continents; but in Europe extensive woods have, at different periods, been deliberately destroyed by fire or the axe, because they afforded a retreat to enemies, robbers, and outlaws, and this practice is said to have been resorted to in the Mediterranean provinces of France as recently as the time of Napoleon I.[253] The severe and even sanguinary legislation, by which some of the governments of mediæval Europe, as well as of earlier ages, protected the woods, was dictated by a love of the chase, or the fear of a scarcity of fuel and timber. The laws of almost every European state more or less adequately secure the permanence of the forest; and I believe Spain is the only European land which has not made some public provision for the protection and restoration of the woods—the only country whose people systematically war upon the garden of God.[254]

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.[255] 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 mediæval 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,[256] 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 Bonnemère observes,[257] 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."[258] 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."[259] 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 Bonnemère, even so good a monarch as Henry IV reënacted 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."[260]

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."[261]

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 protected by 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 were no longer respected.[262] 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 ploughland, its injurious effects 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.

Small Forest Plants, and Vitality of Seed.

Another function of the woods to which I have barely alluded deserves a fuller notice than can be bestowed upon it in a treatise the scope of which is purely economical. The forest is the native habitat of a large number of humbler plants, to the growth and perpetuation of which its shade, its humidity, and its vegetable mould appear to be indispensable necessities.[263] We cannot positively say that the felling of the woods in a given vegetable province would involve the final extinction of the smaller plants which are found only within their precincts. Some of these, though not naturally propagating themselves in the open ground, may perhaps germinate and grow under artificial stimulation and protection, and finally become hardy enough to maintain an independent existence in very different circumstances from those which at present seem essential to their life.

Besides this, although the accounts of the growth of seeds, which have lain for ages in the ashy dryness of Egyptian catacombs, are to be received with great caution, or, more probably, to be rejected altogether, yet their vitality seems almost imperishable while they remain in the situations in which nature deposits them. When a forest old enough to have witnessed the mysteries of the Druids is felled, trees of other species spring up in its place; and when they, in their turn, fall before the axe, sometimes even as soon as they have spread their protecting shade over the surface, the germs which their predecessors had shed years, perhaps centuries before, sprout up, and in due time, if not choked by other trees belonging to a later stage in the order of natural succession, restore again the original wood. In these cases, the seeds of the new crop may often have been brought by the wind, by birds, by quadrupeds, or by other causes; but, in many instances, this explanation is not probable.

When newly cleared ground is burnt over in the United States, the ashes are hardly cold before they are covered with a crop of fire weed, a tall herbaceous plant, very seldom seen growing under other circumstances, and often not to be found for a distance of many miles from the clearing. Its seeds, whether the fruit of an ancient vegetation or newly sown by winds or birds, require either a quickening by a heat which raises to a certain high point the temperature of the stratum where they lie buried, or a special pabulum furnished only by the combustion of the vegetable remains that cover the ground in the woods. Earth brought up from wells or other excavations soon produces a harvest of plants often very unlike those of the local flora.

Moritz Wagner, as quoted by Wittwer,[264] remarks in his description of Mount Ararat: "A singular phenomenon to which my guide drew my attention is the appearance of several plants on the earth-heaps left by the last catastrophe [an earthquake], which grow nowhere else on the mountain, and had never been observed in this region before. The seeds of these plants were probably brought by birds, and found in the loose, clayey soil remaining from the streams of mud, the conditions of growth which the other soil of the mountain refused them." This is probable enough, but it is hardly less so that the flowing mud brought them up to the influence of air and sun, from depths where a previous convulsion had buried them ages before. Seeds of small sylvan plants, too deeply buried by successive layers of forest foliage and the mould resulting from its decomposition to be reached by the plough when the trees are gone and the ground brought under cultivation, may, if a wiser posterity replants the wood which sheltered their parent stems, germinate and grow, after lying for generations in a state of suspended animation.

Darwin says: "In Staffordshire, on the estate of a relation, where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by the hand of man, but several hundred acres of exactly the same nature had been enclosed twenty-five years previously and planted with Scotch fir. The change in the native vegetation of the planted part of the heath was most remarkable—more than is generally seen in passing from one quite different soil to another; not only the proportional numbers of the heath plants were wholly changed, but twelve species of plants (not counting grasses and sedges) flourished in the plantation which could not be found on the heath."[265] Had the author informed us that these twelve plants belonged to a species whose seeds enter into the nutriment of the birds which appeared with the young wood, we could easily account for their presence in the soil; but he says distinctly that the birds were of insectivorous species, and it therefore seems more probable that the seeds had been deposited when an ancient forest protected the growth of the plants which bore them, and that they sprang up to new life when a return of favorable conditions awaked them from a sleep of centuries. Darwin indeed says that the heath "had never been touched by the hand of man." Perhaps not, after it became a heath; but what evidence is there to control the general presumption that this heath was preceded by a forest, in whose shade the vegetables which dropped the seeds in question might have grown?[266]

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.[267]

Although, as I have said, birds do not frequent the deeper recesses of the wood,[268] 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 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 rural industry 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 the larvæ.[269] 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.

Utility of the Forest.

In most parts of Europe, the woods are already so nearly extirpated that the mere protection of those which now exist is by no means an adequate remedy for the evils resulting from the want of them; and besides, as I have already said, abundant experience has shown that no legislation can secure the permanence of the forest in private hands. Enlightened individuals in most European states, governments in others, have made very extensive plantations,[270] and France has now set herself energetically at work to restore the woods in the southern provinces, and thereby to prevent the utter depopulation and waste with which that once fertile soil and delicious climate are threatened.

The objects of the restoration of the forest are as multifarious as the motives that have led to its destruction, and as the evils which that destruction has occasioned. It is hoped that the planting of the mountains will diminish the frequency and violence of river inundations, prevent the formation of torrents, mitigate the extremes of atmospheric temperature, humidity, and precipitation, restore dried-up springs, rivulets, and sources of irrigation, shelter the fields from chilling and from parching winds, prevent the spread of miasmatic effluvia, and, finally, furnish an inexhaustible and self-renewing supply of a material indispensable to so many purposes of domestic comfort, to the successful exercise of every art of peace, every destructive energy of war.[271]

But our enumeration of the uses of trees is not yet complete. Besides the influence of the forest, in mountain ranges, as a means of preventing the scooping out of ravines and the accumulations of water which fill them, trees subserve a valuable purpose, in lower positions, as barriers against the spread of floods and of the material they transport with them; but this will be more appropriately considered in the chapter on the waters; and another very important use of trees, that of fixing movable sand-dunes, and reclaiming them to profitable cultivation, will be pointed out in the chapter on the sands.

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 greatly augmented the demand for wood,[272] and, but for improvements in metallurgy which have facilitated the substitution of iron for that material, the last twenty-five years would almost have stripped Europe of her only remaining trees fit for such uses.[273] The walnut trees alone felled in Europe within two years to furnish the armies of America with gunstocks, would form a forest of no inconsiderable extent.[274]

The Forests of Europe.

Mirabeau estimated the forests of France in 1750 at seventeen millions of hectares [42,000,000 acres]; in 1860 they were reduced to eight millions [19,769,000 acres]. This would be at the rate of 82,000 hectares [202,600 acres] per year. Troy, from whose valuable pamphlet, Étude 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 Ariège, for instance, clearing has gone on during the last half century at the rate of three thousand acres a year,[275] and in all parts of the empire trees have been felled faster than they have grown. The total area of France, excluding Savoy, is 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.[276] 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.[277] 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.

Italy and Spain are bared of trees in a greater degree than France, and even Russia, which we habitually consider as substantially a forest country, is beginning to suffer seriously for want of wood. Jourdier, as quoted by Clavé, 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."[278]

Germany, from character of surface and climate, and from the attention which has long been paid in all the German States to sylviculture, is, taken as a whole, in a far better condition in this respect than its more southern neighbors; but in the Alpine provinces of Bavaria and Austria, the same improvidence which marks the rural economy of the corresponding districts of Switzerland, Italy, and France, is producing effects hardly less disastrous. 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.[279]

Forests of the United States and Canada.

The vast forests of the United States and Canada cannot long resist the improvident habits of the backwoodsman and the increased demand for lumber. According to the census of the former country for 1860, which gives returns of the "sawed and planed lumber" alone, timber for framing and for a vast variety of mechanical purposes being omitted altogether, the value of the former material prepared for market in the United States was, in 1850, $58,521,976; in 1860, $95,912,286. The quantity of unsawed lumber is not likely to have increased in the same proportion, because comparatively little is exported in that condition, and because masonry is fast taking the place of carpentry in building, and stone, brick, and iron are used instead of timber more largely than they were ten years ago. Still a much greater quantity of unsawed lumber must have been marketed in 1860 than in 1850. It must further be admitted that the price of lumber rose considerably between those dates, and consequently that the increase in quantity is not to be measured by the increase in pecuniary value. Perhaps this rise of prices may even be sufficient to make the entire difference between the value of "sawed and planed lumber" produced in the ten years in question by the six New England States (21 per cent.), and the six Middle States (15 per cent.); but the amount produced by the Western and by the Southern States had doubled, and that returned from the Pacific States and Territories had trebled in value in the same interval, so that there was certainly, in those States, a large increase in the actual quantity prepared for sale.

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 a great 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 it is also true that, within the memory of almost every man of mature age, timber was of so little value in that country, that the owners of private woodlands submitted, almost without complaint, to what would be regarded elsewhere as very aggravated trespasses upon them.[280] Under such circumstances, it is difficult to protect the forest, whether it belong to the state or to individuals. Property of this kind would be subject to much plunder, as well as to frequent damage by fire. The destruction from these causes would, indeed, considerably lessen, but would not 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. For prevention of the evils upon which I have so long dwelt, the American people must look to the diffusion of general intelligence on this subject, and to the enlightened self interest, for which they are remarkable, not to the action of their local or general legislatures. Even in France, government has moved with too slow and hesitating a pace, and preventive measures do not yet compensate destructive causes. The judicious remarks of Troy on this point may well be applied to other countries than France, other measures of public policy than the preservation of the woods. "To move softly," says he, "is to commit the most dangerous, the most unpardonable of imprudences; it diminishes the prestige of authority; it furnishes a triumph to the sneerer and the incredulous; it strengthens opposition and encourages resistance; it ruins the administration in the opinion of the people, weakens its power and depresses its courage."[281]

The Economy of the Forest.

The legislation of European states upon sylviculture, and the practice of that art, divide themselves into two great branches—the preservation of existing forests, and the creation of new. From the long operation of causes already set forth, what is understood in America and other new countries by the "primitive forest," no longer exists in the territories which were the seats of ancient civilization and empire, except upon a small scale, and in remote and almost inaccessible glens quite out of the reach of ordinary observation. The oldest European woods, indeed, are native, that is, sprung from self-sown seed, or from the roots of trees which have been felled for human purposes; but their growth has been controlled, in a variety of ways, by man and by domestic animals, and they always present more or less of an artificial character and arrangement. Both they and planted forests, which, though certainly not few, are of recent date in Europe, demand, as well for protection as for promotion of growth, a treatment different in some respects from that which would be suited to the character and wants of the virgin wood.

On this latter branch of the subject, experience and observation have not yet collected a sufficient stock of facts to serve for the construction of a complete system of sylviculture; but the management of the forest as it exists in France—the different zones and climates of which country present many points of analogy with those of the United States and some of the British colonies—has been carefully studied, and several manuals of practice have been prepared for the foresters of that empire. I believe the best of these is the Cours Élémentaire de Culture des Bois créé à l'École Forestière de Nancy, par M. Lorentz, complété, et publié par A. Parade, with a supplement under the title of Cours d'Aménagement des Forêts, par Henri Nanquette. The Études sur l'Économie Forestière, par Jules Clavé, which I have often quoted, presents a great number of interesting views on this subject, and well deserves to be translated for the use of the English and American reader; but it is not designed as a practical guide, and it does not profess to be sufficiently specific in its details to serve that purpose. Notwithstanding the difference of conditions between the aboriginal and the trained forest, the judicious observer who aims at the preservation of the former will reap much instruction from the treatises I have cited, and I believe he will be convinced that the sooner a natural wood is brought into the state of an artificially regulated one, the better it is for all the multiplied interests which depend on the wise administration of this branch of public economy.[282]

One consideration bearing on this subject has received less attention than it merits, because most persons interested in such questions have not opportunities for the comparison I refer to. I mean the great general superiority of cultivated timber to that of strictly spontaneous growth. I say general superiority, because there are exceptions to the rule. The white pine, Pinus strobus, for instance, and other trees of similar character and uses, require, for their perfect growth, a density of forest vegetation around them, which protects them from too much agitation by wind, and from the persistence of the lateral branches which fill the wood with knots. A pine which has grown under those conditions possesses a tall, straight stem, admirably fitted for masts and spars, and, at the same time, its wood is almost wholly free from knots, is regular in annular structure, soft and uniform in texture, and, consequently, superior to almost all other timber for joinery. If, while a large pine is spared, the broad-leaved or other smaller trees around it are felled, the swaying of the tree from the action of the wind mechanically produces separations between the layers of annual growth, and greatly diminishes the value of the timber.

The same defect is often observed in pines which, from some accident of growth, have much overtopped their fellows in the virgin forest. The white pine, growing in the fields, or in open glades in the woods, is totally different from the true forest tree, both in general aspect and in quality of wood. Its stem is much shorter, its top less tapering, its foliage denser and more inclined to gather into tufts, its branches more numerous and of larger diameter, its wood shows much more distinctly the divisions of annual growth, is of coarser grain, harder and more difficult to work into mitre joints. Intermixed with the most valuable pines in the American forests, are met many trees of the character I have just described. The lumbermen call them "saplings," and generally regard them as different in species from the true white pine, but botanists are unable to establish a distinction between them, and as they agree in almost all respects with trees grown in the open grounds from known white-pine seedlings, I believe their peculiar character is due to unfavorable circumstances in their early growth. The pine, then, is an exception to the general rule as to the inferiority of the forest to the open-ground tree. The pasture oak and pasture beech, on the contrary, are well known to produce far better timber than those grown in the woods, and there are few trees to which the remark is not equally applicable.[283]

Another advantage of the artificially regulated forest is, that it admits of such grading of the ground as to favor the retention or discharge of water at will, while the facilities it affords for selecting and duly proportioning, as well as properly spacing, the trees which compose it, are too obvious to require to be more than hinted at. In conducting these operations, we must have a diligent eye to the requirements of nature, and must remember that a wood is not an arbitrary assemblage of trees to be selected and disposed according to the caprice of its owner. "A forest," says Clavé, "is not, as is often supposed, a simple collection of trees succeeding each other in long perspective, without bond of union, and capable of isolation from each other; it is, on the contrary, a whole, the different parts of which are interdependent upon each other, and it constitutes, so to speak, a true individuality. Every forest has a special character, determined by the form of the surface it grows upon, the kinds of trees that compose it, and the manner in which they are grouped."[284]

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 Clavé, 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."[285] Our author, however, doubtless means genera, though he uses the word espèces. Rossmässler 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, though it is indigenous in Algeria also. We may then safely say that Europe does not possess above forty or fifty trees of such economical value as to be worth the special care of the forester, while the oak alone numbers not less than thirty species in the United States,[286] and some other North American genera are almost equally diversified.[287]

Few European trees, except those bearing edible fruit, have been naturalized in the United States, while the American forest flora has made large contributions to that of Europe. It is a very poor taste which has led to the substitution of the less picturesque European for the graceful and majestic American elm, in some public grounds in the United States. On the other hand, the European mountain ash—which in beauty and healthfulness of growth is superior to our own—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 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 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.[288] 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 épicéa, 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.[289] The cork oak has been introduced into the United States, I believe, and would undoubtedly thrive in the Southern section of the Union.[290]

In 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.[291]

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 watercourses with a rainbow splendor of foliage, unsurpassed by the brightest groupings of the tropical flora. It must be admitted, 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.

No American evergreen known to me resembles the umbrella pine sufficiently to be a fair object of comparison with it.[292] A cedar, very common above the Highlands on the Hudson, 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. 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 the date palm is of the oases of the 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. 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.[293]

Sylviculture.

The art, or, as the Continental foresters call it, the science of sylviculture has been so little pursued in England and America, that its nomenclature has not been introduced into the English vocabulary, and I shall not be able to describe its processes with technical propriety of language, without occasionally borrowing a word from the forest literature of France and Germany. A full discussion of the methods of sylviculture would, indeed, be out of place in a work like the present, but the almost total want of conveniently accessible means of information on the subject, in English-speaking countries, will justify me in presenting it with somewhat more of detail than would otherwise be pertinent.

The two best known methods are those distinguished as the taillis, copse or coppice treatment,[294] and the futaie, for which I find no English equivalent, but which may not inappropriately be called the full-growth system. A taillis, copse, or coppice, is a wood composed of shoots from the roots of trees previously cut for fuel and timber. The shoots are thinned out from time to time, and finally cut, either after a fixed number of years, or after the young trees have attained to certain dimensions, their roots being then left to send out a new progeny as before. This is the cheapest method of management, and therefore the best wherever the price of labor and of capital bears a high proportion to that of land and of timber; but it is essentially a wasteful economy. If the woodland is, in the first place, completely cut over, as is found most convenient in practice, the young shoots have neither the shade nor the protection from wind so important to forest growth, and their progress is comparatively slow, while, at the same time, the thick clumps they form choke the seedlings that may have sprouted near them. If domestic animals of any species are allowed to roam in the wood, they browse upon the terminal buds and the tender branches, thereby stunting, if they do not kill, the young trees, and depriving them of all beauty and vigor of growth. The evergreens, once cut, do not shoot up again,[295] and the mixed character of the forest—in many respects an important advantage, if not an indispensable condition of growth—is lost;[296] and besides this, large wood of any species cannot be grown in this method, because trees which shoot from decaying stumps and their dying roots, become hollow or otherwise unsound before they acquire their full dimensions. A more fatal objection still, is, that the roots of trees will not bear more than two or three, or at most four cuttings of their shoots before their vitality is exhausted, and the wood can then be restored only by replanting entirely. The period of cutting coppices varies in Europe from fifteen to forty years, according to soil, species, and rapidity of growth.

In the futaie, or full-growth system, the trees are allowed to stand as long as they continue in healthy and vigorous growth. This is a shorter period than would be at first supposed, when we consider the advanced age and great dimensions to which, under favorable circumstances, many forest trees attain in temperate climates. But, as every observing person familiar with the natural forest is aware, these are exceptional cases, just as are instances of great longevity or of gigantic stature among men. Able vegetable physiologists have maintained that the tree, like most reptiles, has no natural limit of life or of growth, and that the only reason why our oaks and our pines do not reach the age of twenty centuries and the height of a hundred fathoms, is, that in the multitude of accidents to which they are exposed, the chances of their attaining to such a length of years and to such dimensions of growth are a million to one against them. But another explanation of this fact is possible. In trees affected by no discoverable external cause of death, decay begins at the topmost branches, which seem to wither and die for want of nutriment. The mysterious force by which the sap is carried from the roots to the utmost twigs, cannot be conceived to be unlimited in power, and it is probable that it differs in different species, so that while it may suffice to raise the fluid to the height of five hundred feet in the sequoia, it may not be able to carry it beyond one hundred and fifty in the oak. The limit may be different, too, in different trees of the same species, not from defective organization in those of inferior growth, but from more or less favorable conditions of soil, nourishment, and exposure. Whenever a tree attains to the limit beyond which its circulating fluids cannot rise, we may suppose that decay begins, and death follows, from the same causes which bring about the same results in animals of limited size—such, for example, as the interruption of functions essential to life, in consequence of the clogging up of ducts by matter assimilable in the stage of growth, but no longer so when increment has ceased.

In the natural woods, we observe that, though, among the myriads of trees which grow upon a square mile, there are several vegetable giants, yet the great majority of them begin to decay long before they have attained their maximum of stature, and this seems to be still more emphatically true of the artificial forest. In France, according to Clavé, "oaks, in a suitable soil, may stand, without exhibiting any sign of decay, for two or three hundred years; the pines hardly exceed one hundred and twenty, and the soft or white woods [bois blancs], in wet soils, languish and die before reaching the fiftieth year."[297] These ages are certainly below the average of those of American forest trees, and are greatly exceeded in very numerous well-attested instances of isolated trees in Europe.

The former mode of treating the futaie, called the garden system, was to cut the trees individually as they arrived at maturity, but, in the best regulated forests, this practice has been abandoned for the German method, which embraces not only the securing of the largest immediate profit, but the replanting of the forest, and the care of the young growth. This is effected in the case of a forest, whether natural or artificial, which is to be subjected to regular management, by three operations. The first of these consists in felling about one third of the wood, in such way as to leave convenient spaces for the growth of young trees. The remaining two-thirds are relied upon to replant the vacancies, by natural sowing, which they seldom or never fail to do. The seedlings are watched, are thinned out when too dense, the ill formed and sickly, as well as those of inferior value, and the shrubs and thorns which might otherwise choke or too closely shade them, are pulled up. When they have attained sufficient strength and development of foliage to bear or to require more light and air, the second step is taken, by removing a suitable proportion of the old trees which had been spared at the first cutting; and when, finally, they are hardened enough to bear frost and sun without other protection than that which they mutually give to each other, the remainder of the original forest is felled, and the wood now consists wholly of young and vigorous trees. This result is obtained after about twenty years. At convenient periods afterward, the unhealthy stocks and those injured by wind or other accidents are removed, and in some instances the growth of the remainder is promoted by irrigation or by fertilizing applications.[298] When the forest is approaching to maturity, the original processes already described are repeated; and as, in different parts of an extensive forest, they would take place in different zones, it would afford indefinitely an annual crop of firewood and timber.

The duties of the forester do not end here. It sometimes happens that the glades left by felling the older trees are not sufficiently seeded, or that the species, or essences, as the French oddly call them, are not duly proportioned in the new crop. In this case, seed must be artificially sown, or young trees planted in the vacancies.

One of the most important rules in the administration of the forest is the absolute exclusion of domestic quadrupeds from every wood which is not destined to be cleared. No growth of young trees is possible where cattle are admitted to pasture at any season of the year, though they are undoubtedly most destructive while trees are in leaf.[299]

It is often necessary to take measures for the protection of young trees against the rabbit, the mole, and other rodent quadrupeds, and of older ones against the damage done by the larvæ of insects hatched upon the surface or in the tissues of the bark, or even in the wood itself. The much greater liability of the artificial than of the natural forest to injury from this cause is perhaps the only point in which the superiority of the former to the latter is not as marked as that of any domesticated vegetable to its wild representative. But the better quality of the wood and the much more rapid growth of the trained and regulated forest are abundant compensations for the loss thus occasioned, and the progress of entomological science will, perhaps, suggest new methods of preventing the ravages of insects. Thus far, however, the collection and destruction of the eggs, by simple but expensive means, has proved the only effectual remedy.[300]

It is common in Europe to permit the removal of the fallen leaves and fragments of bark and branches with which the forest soil is covered, and sometimes the cutting of the lower twigs of evergreens. The leaves and twigs are principally used as litter for cattle, and finally as manure, the bark and wind-fallen branches as fuel. By long usage, sometimes by express grant, this privilege has become a vested right of the population in the neighborhood of many public, and even large private forests; but it is generally regarded as a serious evil. To remove the leaves and fallen twigs is to withdraw much of the pabulum upon which the tree was destined to feed. The small branches and leaves are the parts of the tree which yield the largest proportion of ashes on combustion, and of course they supply a great amount of nutriment for the young shoots. "A cubic foot of twigs," says Vaupell, "yields four times as much ashes as a cubic foot of stem wood. * * For every hundred weight of dried leaves carried off from a beech forest, we sacrifice a hundred and sixty cubic feet of wood. The leaves and the mosses are a substitute, not only for manure, but for ploughing. The carbonic acid given out by decaying leaves, when taken up by water, serves to dissolve the mineral constituents of the soil, and is particularly active in disintegrating feldspar and the clay derived from its decomposition. * * * The leaves belong to the soil. Without them it cannot preserve its fertility, and cannot furnish nutriment to the beech. The trees languish, produce seed incapable of germination, and the spontaneous self-sowing, which is an indispensable element in the best systems of sylviculture, fails altogether in the bared and impoverished soil."[301]

Besides these evils, the removal of the leaves deprives the soil of that spongy character which gives it such immense value as a reservoir of moisture and a regulator of the flow of springs; and, finally, it exposes the surface roots to the drying influence of sun and wind, to accidental mechanical injury from the tread of animals or men, and, in cold climates, to the destructive effects of frost.

The annual lopping and trimming of trees for fuel, so common in Europe, is fatal to the higher uses of the forest, but where small groves are made, or rows of trees planted, for no other purpose than to secure a supply of firewood, or to serve as supports for the vine, it is often very advantageous. The willows, and many other trees, bear polling for a long series of years without apparent diminution of growth of branches, and though certainly a polled, or, to use an old English word, a doddered tree, is in general a melancholy object, yet it must be admitted that the aspect of some species—the American locust, Robinia pseudacacia, for instance—when young, is improved by this process.[302]

I have spoken of the needs of agriculture as a principal cause of the destruction of the forest, and of domestic cattle as particularly injurious to the growth of young trees. But these animals affect the forest, indirectly, in a still more important way, because 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 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 plough land.[303]

In fertile countries, like the United States, the foreign demand for animal and vegetable aliment, for cotton, and for tobacco, much enlarges the sphere of agricultural operations, and, of course, prompts further encroachments upon the forest. The commerce in these articles, therefore, constitutes in America a special cause of the destruction of the woods, which does not exist in the numerous states of the Old World that derive the raw material of their mechanical industry from distant lands, and import many articles of vegetable food or luxury which their own climates cannot advantageously produce.

The growth of arboreal vegetation is so slow that, though he who buries an acorn may hope to see it shoot up to a miniature resemblance of the majestic tree which shall shade his remote descendants, yet the longest life hardly embraces the seedtime and the harvest of a forest. The planter of a wood must be actuated by higher motives than those of an investment the profits of which consist in direct pecuniary gain to himself or even to his posterity; for if, in rare cases, an artificial forest may, in two or three generations, more than repay its original cost, still, in general, the value of its timber will not return the capital expended and the interest accrued.[304] But when we consider the immense collateral advantages derived from the presence, the terrible evils necessarily resulting from the destruction of the forest, both the preservation of existing woods, and the far more costly extension of them where they have been unduly reduced, are among the most obvious of the duties which this age owes to those that are to come after it. Especially is this obligation incumbent upon Americans. No civilized people profits so largely from the toils and sacrifices of its immediate predecessors as they; no generations have ever sown so liberally, and, in their own persons, reaped so scanty a return, as the pioneers of Anglo-American social life. We can repay our debt to our noble forefathers only by a like magnanimity, by a like self-forgetting care for the moral and material interests of our own posterity.

Instability of American Life.