Contrivances for economizing fuel came later into use in the British Islands than on the Continent. Before the introduction of a system of drainage, the soil, like the sky, was, in general, charged with humidity; its natural condition was unfavorable for the construction and maintenance of substantial common roads, and the transportation of so heavy a material as coal, by land, from the remote counties where alone it was mined in the Middle Ages, was costly and difficult. For all these reasons, the consumption of wood was large, and apprehensions of the exhaustion of the forests were excited at an early period. Legislation there, as elsewhere, proved ineffectual to protect them, and many authors of the sixteenth century express fears of serious evils from the wasteful economy of the people in this respect. Harrison, in his curious chapter "Of Woods and Marishes" in Holinshed's compilation, complains of the rapid decrease of the forests, and adds: "Howbeit thus much I dare affirme, that if woods go so fast to decaie in the next hundred yeere of Grace, as they haue doone and are like to doo in this, . . . it is to be feared that the fennie bote, broome, turfe, gall, heath, firze, brakes, whinnes, ling, dies, hassacks, flags, straw, sedge, reed, rush, and also seacole, will be good merchandize euen in the citie of London, whereunto some of them euen now haue gotten readie passage, and taken up their innes in the greatest merchants' parlours . . . . I would wish that I might liue no longer than to see foure things in this land reformed, that is: the want of discipline in the church: the couetous dealing of most of our merchants in the preferment of the commodities of other countries, and hinderance of their owne: the holding of faires and markets vpon the sundaie to be abolished and referred to the wednesdaies: and that euerie man, in whatsoeuer part of the champaine soile enioieth fortie acres of land, and vpwards, after that rate, either by free deed, copie hold, or fee farme, might plant one acre of wood, or sowe the same with oke mast, hasell, beech, and sufficient prouision be made that it may be cherished and kept. But I feare me that I should then liue too long, and so long, that I should either be wearie of the world, or the world of me." [Footnote: Holinshed, reprint of 1807, i., pp. 357, 358. It is evident from this passage, and from another on page 397 of the same volume, that, though seacoal was largely exported to the Continent, it had not yet come into general use in England. It is a question of much interest, when mineral coal was first employed in England for fuel. I can find no evidence that it was used as a combustible until more than a century after the Norman conquest. It has been said that it was known to the Anglo-Saxon population, but I am acquainted with no passage in the literature of that people which proves this. The dictionaries explain the Anglo-Saxon word grofa by sea-coal. I have met with this word in no Anglo-Saxon work, except in the Chronicle, A.D. 852, from a manuscript certainly not older than the 12th century, and in two citations from Anglo-Saxon charters, one published by Kemble in Codex Diplomaticus, the other by Thorpe in Diplomatarium Anglicum, in all which passages it more probably means peat than mineral coal. According to Way, Promptorium Parrulorum, p. 506, note, the Catholicon Anglicanum has "A turfe grafte, turbarium." Grafte is here evidently the same word as the A.-S. grafa, and the Danish Torvegraf, a turf-pit, confirms this opinion. Coal is not mentioned in King Alfred's Bede, in Neckam, in Glanville or in Robert of Gloucester, though the two latter writers speak of the allied mineral, jet, and are very full in their enumeration of the mineral productions of the island. In a Latin poem ascribed to Giraldus Cambrensis, who died after the year 1220, but found also in the manuesripts of Walter Mapes (see Camden Society edition, pp. 131 and 350), and introduced into Higden's Polychronicon (London, 1865, pp. 398, 399), carbo sub terra cortice, which can mean nothing but pit-coal, is enumerated among the natural commodities of England. Some of the translations of the 13th and 14th century render carbo by cool or col, some by gold, and some omit this line, as well as others unintelligible to the translators. Hence, although Giraldus was acquainted with coal, it certainly was not generally known to English writers until at least a century after the time of that author.
The earliest mediaeval notice of mineral coal I have met with is in a passage cited by Ducange from a document of the year 1198, and it is an etymological observation of some interest, that carbones ferrei, as sea-coal is called in the document, are said by Ducange to have been known in France by the popular name of hulla, a word evidently identical with the modern French houille and the Cornish Huel, which in the form wheal is an element in the name of many mining localities.
England was anciently remarkable for its forests, but Caesar says it wanted the fagus and the abies. There can be no doubt that fagus means the beech, which, as the remains in the Danish peat-mosses show, is a tree of late introduction into Denmark, where it succeeded the fir, a tree not now native to that country. The succession of forest crops seems to have been the same in England; for Harrison, p. 359, speaks of the "great store of firre" found lying "at their whole lengths" in the "fens and marises" of Lancashire and other counties, where not even bushes grew in his time. We cannot be sure what species of evergreen Caesar intended by abies. The popular designations of spike-leaved trees are always more vague and uncertain in their application than those of broad-leaved trees. PINUS, PINE, has been very loosely employed even in botanical nomenclature, and KIEFER, FICHTE, and TANNE are often confounded in German.—Rossmassler, Der Wald, pp. 256, 289, 324. A similar confusion in the names of this family of trees exists in India. Dr. Cleghorn, Inspector-General of the Indian Forests, informs us in his official Circular No. 2, that the name of deodar is applied in some provinces to a cypress, in some to a cedar, and in others to a juniper. If it were certain that the abies of Caesar was the fir formerly and still found in peat-mosses, and that he was right in denying the existence of the beech in England in his time, the observation would be very important, because it would fix a date at which the fir had become extinct, and the beech had not yet appeared in the island.
The English oak, though strong and durable, was not considered generally suitable for finer work in the sixteenth century. There were, however, exceptions. "Of all in Essex," observes Harrison, Holinshed, i., p. 357, "that growing in Bardfield parke is the finest for ioiners craft; for oftentimes haue I seene of their workes made of that oke so fine and faire, as most of the wainescot that is brought hither out of Danske [Danzig]; for our wainescot is not made in England. Yet diuerse haue assaied to deale with our okes to that end, but not with so good successe as they haue hoped, bicause the ab or iuice will not so soone be removed and cleane drawne out, which some attribute to want of time in the salt water." This passage is also of interest as showing that soaking in salt-water, as a mode of seasoning, was practised in Harrison's time.
But the importation of wainscot, or boards for ceiling, panelling, and otherwise finishing rooms, which was generally of oak, commenced at least three centuries before the time of Harrison. On page 204 of the Liber Albus mention is made of "squared oak timber," brought in from the country by carts, and of course of domestic growth, as free of city duty or octroi, and of "planks of oak" coming in in the same way as paying one plank a cart-load. But in the chapter on the "Customs of Billyngesgate," pp. 208, 209, relating to goods imported from foreign countries, an import duty of one halfpenny is imposed on every hundred of boards called "weynscotte"—a term formerly applied only to oak—and of one penny on every hundred of boards called "Rygholt." The editor explains "Rygholt" as "wood of Riga." This was doubtless pine or fir. The year in which these provisions were made does not appear, but they belong to the reign of Henry III.]
Evelyn's "Silva," the first edition of which appeared in 1664, rendered an extremely important service to the cause of the woods, and there is no doubt that the ornamental plantations in which England far surpasses all other countries, are, in some measure, the fruit of Evelyn's enthusiasm. In England, however, arboriculture, the planting and nursing of single trees, has, until comparatively recent times, been better understood than sylviculture, the sowing and training of the forest. But this latter branch of rural improvement now receives great attention from private individuals, though, so far as I know, not from the National Government, except in the East Indian provinces, where the forestal department has assumed great importance. [Footnote: The improvidence of the population under the native and early foreign governments has produced great devastations in the forests of the British East Indian provinces, and the demands of the railways for fuel and timber have greatly augmented the consumption of lumber, and of course contributed to the destruction of the woods. The forests of British India are now, and for several years have been, under the control of an efficient governmental organization, with great advantage both to the government and to the general private interests of the people.
The official Reports on Forest Conservancy from May, 1862, to August, 1871, in 4 vols. folio, contain much statistical and practical information on all subjects connected with the administration of the forest.]
In fact, England is, I believe, the only European country where private enterprise has pursued sylviculture on a really great scale, though admirable examples have been set in many others. In England the law of primogeniture, and other institutions and national customs which tend to keep large estates long undivided and in the same line of inheritance, the wealth of the landholders, the special adaptation of the climate to the growth of forest-trees, and the difficulty of finding safe and profitable investments of capital, combine to afford encouragements for the plantation of forests, which scarcely exist elsewhere in the same degree.
In Scotland, where the country is for the most part broken and mountainous, the general destruction of the forests has been attended with very serious evils, and it is in Scotland that many of the most extensive British forest plantations have now been formed. But although the inclination of surface in Scotland is rapid, the geological constitution of the soil is not of a character to promote such destructive degradation by running water as in Southern France, and it has not to contend with the parching droughts by which the devastations of the torrents are rendered more injurious in those provinces.
It is difficult to understand how either law or public opinion, in a country occupied by a dense and intelligent population, and, comparatively speaking, with an infertile soil, can tolerate the continued withdrawal of a great portion of the territory from the cultivation of trees and from other kinds of rural economy, merely to allow wealthy individuals to amuse themselves with field-sports. In Scotland, 2,000,000 acres, as well suited to the growth of forests and for pasture as is the soil generally, are withheld from agriculture, that they may be given up to herds of deer protected by the game laws. A single nobleman, for example, thus appropriates for his own pleasures not less than 100,000 acres. [Footnote: Robertson, Our Deer Forests. London, 1867.] In this way one-tenth of all the land of Scotland is rendered valueless in an economical point of view—for the returns from the sale of the venison and other game scarcely suffice to pay the game-keepers and other incidental expenses—and in these so-called FORESTS there grows neither building timber nor fire-wood worth the cutting, as the animals destroy the young shoots.
Forests of France.
The preservation of the woods was one of the wise measures recommended to France by Sully, in the time of Henry IV., but the advice was little heeded, and the destruction of the forests went on with such alarming rapidity, that, two generations later, Colbert uttered the prediction: "France will perish for want of wood." Still, the extent of wooded soil was very great, and the evils attending its diminution were not so sensibly felt, that either the government or public opinion saw the necessity of authoritative interference, and in 1750 Mirabeau estimated the remaining forests of the kingdom at seventeen millions of hectares [42,000,000 acres]. In 1860 they were reduced to eight millions [19,769,000 acres], or at the rate of 82,000 hectares [202,600 acres] per year. Troy, from whose valuable pamphlet, Etude sur le Reboisement des Montagnes, I take these statistical details, supposes that Mirabeau's statement may have been an extravagant one, but it still remains certain that the waste has been enormous; for it is known that, in some departments, that of Ariege, for instance, clearing has gone on during the last half-century at the rate of three thousand acres a year, and in all parts of the empire trees have been felled faster than they have grown. [Footnote: Among the indirect proofs of the comparatively recent existence of extensive forests in France, may be mentioned the fact that wolves were abundant, not very long since, in parts of the empire where there are now neither wolves nor woods to shelter them. Arthur Young more than once speaks of the "innumerable multitudes" of these animals which infested France in 1789, and George Sand states, in the Histoire de ma Vie, that some years after the restoration of the Bourbons, they chased travellers on horseback in the southern provinces, and literally knocked at the doors of her father-in-law's country seat. Eugenie de Guerin, writing from Rayssac in Languedoc in 1831 speaks of hearing the wolves fighting with dogs in the night under her very windows. Lettres, 2d ed., p. 6.
There seems to have been a tendency to excessive clearing in Central and Western, earlier than in South-eastern, France. Bernard Palissy, in the Recepte Veritable, first printed in 1563, thus complains: "When I consider the value of the least clump of trees, or even of thorns, I much marvel at the great ignorance of men, who, as it seemeth, do nowadays study only to break down, fell, and waste the fair forests which their forefathers did guard so choicely. I would think no evil of them for cutting down the woods, did they but replant again some part of them; but they care nought for the time to come, neither reck they of the great damage they do to their children which shall come after them."—Oeuvres Completes de Bernard Pallisy, 1844, p. 88.] The total area of France in Mirabeau's time, excluding Savoy, but including Alsace and Lorraine, was about one hundred and thirty-one millions of acres. The extent of forest supposed by Mirabeau would be about thirty-two per cent. of the whole territory. In a country and a climate where the conservative influences of the forest are so necessary as in France, trees must cover a large surface and be grouped in large masses, in order to discharge to the best advantage the various functions assigned to them by nature. The consumption of wood is rapidly increasing in that empire, and a large part of its territory is mountainous, sterile, and otherwise such in character or situation that it can be more profitably devoted to the growth of wood than to any agricultural use. Hence it is evident that the proportion of forest in 1750, taking even Mirabeau's large estimate, was not very much too great for permanent maintenance, though doubtless the distribution was so unequal that it would have been sound policy to fell the woods and clear land in some provinces, while large forests should have been planted in others. [Footnote: The view I have taken of this point is confirmed by the careful investigation of Rentzsch, who estimates the proper proportion of woodland to entire surface at twenty-three per cent. for the interior of Germany, and supposes that near the coast, where the air is supplied with humidity by evaporation from the sea, it might safely be reduced to twenty per cent. See Rentzsch's very valuable prize essay, Der Wald im Haushalt der Natur und der Volkswirthschaft. cap. viii.
The due proportion in France would considerably exceed that for the German States, because France has relatively more surface unfit for any growth but that of wood, because the form and geological character of her mountains expose her territory to much greater injury from torrents, and beause at least her southern provinces are more frequently visited both by extreme droughts and by deluging rains.] During the period in question France neither exported manufactured wood or rough timber, nor derived important collateral advantages of any sort from the destruction of her forests. She is consequently impoverished and crippled to the extent of the difference between what she actually possesses of wooded surface and what she ought to have retained. [Footnote: In 1863, France imported lumber to the value of twenty-five and a half millions of dollars, and exported to the amount of six and a half millions of dollars. The annual consumption of France was estimated in 1866 at 212,000,000 cubic feet for building and manufacturing, and 1,588,300,000 for firewood and charcoal. The annual product of the forest-soil of France does not exceed 70,000,000 cubic feet of wood fit for industrial use, and 1,300,000,000 cubic feet consumed as fuel. This estimate does not include the product of scattered trees on private grounds, but the consumption is estimated to exceed the production of the forests by the amount of about twenty millions of dollars. It is worth noticing that the timber for building and manufacturing produced in France comes almost wholly from the forests of the state or of the communes.—Jules Clave, in Revue des Deux Mondes for March 1, 1866, p. 207.]
The force of the various considerations which have been suggested in regard to the importance of the forest has been generally felt in France, and the subject has been amply debated special treatises, in scientific journals, and by the public press, as well as in the legislative body of that country. Perhaps no one point has been more prominent in the discussions than the influence of the forest in equalizing and regulating the flow of the water of precipitation. Opinion is still somewhat divided on this subject, but the value of the woods as a safeguard against the ravages of torrents is universally acknowledged, and it is hardly disputed that the rise of river-floods is, even if as great, at least less sudden in streams having their sources in well-wooded territory.
Upon the whole, the conservative action of the woods in regard to torrents and to inundations has ben generally recognized by the public of France as a matter of prime importance, and the Government of the empire has made this principle the basis of a special system of legislation for the protection of existing forests, and for the formation of new. The clearing of woodland, and the organization and functions of a police for its protection, are regulated by a law bearing date June 18th, 1859, and provision was made for promoting the restoration of private woods by a statute adopted on the 28th of July, 1860. The former of these laws passed the legislative body by a vote of 246 against 4, the latter with but a single negative voice. The influence of the Government, in a country where the throne is as potent as in France, would account for a large majority, but when it is considered that both laws, the former especially, interfere very materially with the rights of private domain, the almost entire unanimity with which they were adopted is proof of a very general popular conviction, that the protection and extension of the forests is a measure more likely than any other to arrest the devastations of the torrents and check the violence, if not to prevent the recurrence, of destructive river inundations. The law of July 28th, 1860, appropriated 10,000,000 francs, to be expended, at the rate of 1,000,000 francs per year, in executing or aiding the replanting of woods. It is computed that this appropriation—which, considering the vast importance of the subject, does not seem extravagant for a nation rich enough to be able to expend annually six hundred times that sum in the maintenance of its military establishments in times of peace—will secure the creation of new forest to the extent of about 200,000 acres, or one fourteenth part of the soil, where the restoration of the woods is thought feasible, and, at the same time, specially important as a security against the evils ascribed, in a great measure, to its destruction. [Footnote: In 1848 the Government of the so-called French Republic sold to the Bank of France 187,000 acres of public forests, and notwithstanding the zeal with which the Imperial Government had pressed the protective Iegislation of 1860, it introduced, into the Legislative Assembly in 1865 a bill for the sale, and consequently destruction, of the forests of the state to the amount of one hundred million francs. The question was much debated in the Assembly, and public opinion manifested itself so energetically against the measure that the ministry felt itself compelled to withdraw it. See the discussions in D'Alienation des Forets de l'Etat. Paris, 1865. The late Imperial Government sold about 170,000 acres of woodland between 1852 and 1866, both inclusive. The other Governments, since the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, alienated more than 700,000 acres of the public forests, exclusive of sales between 1836 and 1857, which are not reported.—Annuaire des Eaux et Forets, 1872, p. 9.]
In 1865 the Legislative Assembly passed a bill amendatory of the law of 1860, providing, among other things, for securing the soil in exposed localities by grading, and by promoting the growth of grass and the formation of greensward over the surface. This has proved a most beneficial measure, and its adoption under corresponding conditions in the United States is most highly to be recommended. The leading features of the system are:
1. Marking out and securing from pasturage and all other encroachments a zone along the banks and around the head of ravines.
2. Turfing this zone, which in France accomplishes itself, if not spontaneously, at least with little aid from art.
3. Consolidation of the scarps of the ravines by grading and wattling and establishing barriers, sometimes of solid masonry, but generally of fascines or any other simple materials at hand, across the bed of the stream.
4. Cutting banquettes or narrow terraces along the scarps, and planting rows of small deciduous trees and arborescent shrubs upon them, alternating with belts of grass obtained by turfing with sods or sowing grass-seeds. Planting the banquettes and slopes with bushes, and sowing any other vegetables with tenacious roots, is also earnestly recommended. [Footnote: See a description of similar processes recommended and adopted by Mengotti, in his Idraulica, vol. ii., chap. xvii.]
Remedies against Torrents.
The rural population, which in France is generally hostile to all forest laws, soon acquiesced in the adoption of this system, and its success has far surpassed all expectation. At the end of the year 1868 about 190,000 acres had been planted with trees, [Footnote: Travellers spending the winter at Nice may have a good opportunity of studying the methods of forming and conducting the rewooding of mountain slopes, under the most unfavorable conditions, by visiting Mont Boron, in the immediate vicinity of that city, and other coast plantations in that province, where great difficulties have been completely overcome by the skill and perseverance of French foresters. See Les Forets des Maures, Revue des Eaux et Forets, January, 1869.] and nearly 7,000 acres well turfed over in the Department of the Hautes Alpes. Many hundred ravines, several of which had been the channels of formidable torrents, had been secured by barriers, grading and planting, and according to official reports the aspect of the mountains in the Department, wherever these methods were employed, had rapidly changed. The soil had acquired such stability that the violent rains of 1868, so destructive elsewhere, produced no damage in the districts which had been subjected to these operations, and numerous growing torrents which threatened irreparable mischief had been completely extinguished, or at least rendered altogether harmless. [Footnote: For ample details of processes and results, see the second volume of Surrell, Etudes sur les Torrents, Paris, 1872, and a Report by De La Grye, in the Revue des Eaux et Forets for January, 1869.]
Besides the processes directed by the Government of France, various subsidiary measures of an easily and economically practicable character have been suggested. Among them is one which has long been favorably known in our Southern States under the name of circling, and the adoption of which in hilly regions in other States is to be strongly recommended.
It is simply a method of preventing the wash of surface by rains, and at the same time of providing a substitute for irrigation of steep pasture-grounds, consisting in little more than in running horizontal furrows along the hillsides, thus converting the scarp of the hills into a succession of small terraces which, when once turfed over, are very permanent. Experience is said to have demonstrated that this simple process at least partially checks the too rapid flow of surface-water into the valleys, and, consequently, in a great measure obviates one of the most prominent causes of inundations, and that it suffices to retain the water of rains, of snows, and of small springs, long enough for the irrigation of the soil, thus increasing its product of herbage in a fivefold proportion. [Footnote: Troy, Etude sur le Reboisement des Montagnes, sections 6, 7, 21.]
As a further recommendation, it may be observed that this process is an admirable preparation of the ground for forest plantations, as young trees planted on the terraces would derive a useful protection from the form of the surface and the coating of turf, and would also find a soil moist enough to secure their growth.
Forests of Italy.
According to the most recent statistics, Italy has 17.64 per cent. of woodland, [Footnote: Siemoni, Manuale d'Arte Forestale, 2 ediz., Firenze, 1872, p. 542.] a proportion which, considering the character of climate and surface, the great amount of soil which is fit for no other purpose than the growth of trees, and the fact that much of the land classed as forest is either very imperfectly wooded, or covered with groves badly administered, and not in a state of progressive improvement, might advantageously be doubled. Taking Italy as a whole, we may say that she is eminently fitted by climate, soil, and superficial formation, to the growth of a varied and luxuriant arboreal vegetation, and that in the interests of self-protection, the promotion of forestal industry is among the first duties of her people. There are in Western Piedmont valleys where the felling of the woods has produced consequences geographically and economically as disastrous as in South-eastern France, and there are many other districts in the Alps and the Apennines where human improvidence has been almost equally destructive. Some of these regions must be abandoned to absolute desolation, and for others the opportunity of physical restoration is rapidly passing away. But there are still millions of square miles which might profitably be planted with forest-trees, and thousands of acres of parched and barren hillside, within sight of almost every Italian provincial capital, which might easily and shortly be reclothed with verdant woods. [Footnote: To one accustomed to the slow vegetation of less favored climes, the rapidity of growth in young plantations in Italy seems almost magical. The trees planted along the new drives and avenues in Florence have attained in three or four years a development which would require at least ten in our Northern States. This, it is true, is a special case, for the trees have been planted and tended with a skill and care which cannot be bestowed upon a forest; but the growth of trees little cared for is still very rapid in Italy. According to Toscanelli, Economia rurale nella Provincia di Pisa, p. 8, note—one of the most complete, curious, and instructive pictures of rural life which exists in any literature—the white poplar, Populus alba, attains in the valley of the Serchio a great height, with a mean diameter of two feet, in twenty years. Solmi states in his Miasma Palustre, p. 115, that the linden reaches a diameter of sixteen inches in the same period. The growth of foreign trees is sometimes extremely luxuriant in Italy. Two Atlas cedars, at the well-known villa of Careggi, near Florence, grown from seed sown in 1850, measure twenty inches in diameter, above the swell of the roots, with an estimated height of sixty feet.]
The denudation of the Central and Southern Apennines and of the Italian declivity of the Western Alps began at a period of unknown antiquity, but it does not seem to have been carried to a very dangerous length until the foreign conquests and extended commerce of Rome created a greatly increased demand for wood for the construction of ships and for military material. [Footnote: An interesting example of the collateral effects of the destruction of the forests in ancient Italy may be found in old Roman architecture. In the oldest brick constructions of Rome the bricks are very thin, very thoroughly burnt, and laid with a thick stratum of mortar between the courses. A few centuries later the bricks were thicker and less well burnt, and the layers of mortar were thinner. In the Imperial period the bricks were still thicker, generally soft-burnt, and with little mortar between the courses. This fact, I think, is due to the abundance and cheapness of fuel in earlier, and its growing scarceness and dearness in later, ages. When wood cost little, constructors could afford to burn their brick thoroughly, and to burn and use a great quantity of lime. As the price of fire-wood advanced, they were able to consume less fuel in brick- and lime-kilns, and the quality and quantity of brick and lime used in building were gradually reversed in proportion.
The multitude of geographical designations in Italy which indicate the former existence of forests show that even in the Middle Ages there were woods where no forest-trees are now to be found. There are hundreds of names of mediaeval towns derived from abete, acero, carpino, castagno, faggio, frassino, pino, quercia, and other names of trees.] The Eastern Alps, the Western Apennines, and the Maritime Alps retained their forests much later; but even here the want of wood, and the injury to the plains and the nagivation of the rivers by sediment brought down by the torrents, led to legislation for the protection of the forests, by the Republic of Venice, at various periods between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, [Footnote: See A. de Bereuger's valuable Saggio Storico della Legislazione Veneta Forestale. Venezia, 1863.
We do not find in the Venetian forestal legislation much evidence that geographical arguments were taken into account by the lawgivers, who seem to have had an eye only to economical considerations.
According to Hummel, the desolation of the Karst, the high plateau lying north of Trieste, now one of the most parched and barren districts in Europe, is owing to the felling of the woods, centuries ago, to build the navies of Venice. "Where the miserable peasant of the Karst now sees nothing but bare rock swept and scoured by the raging Bora, the fury of this wind was once subdued by mighty firs, which Venice recklessly cut down to build her fleets."—Physische Geographie, p. 32.] by that of Genoa as early at least as the seventeenth; and both these Governments, as well as several others, passed laws requiring the proprietors of mountain-lands to replant the woods. These, however, seem to have been little observed, and it is generally true that the present condition of the forest in Italy is much less due to the want of wise legislation for its protection than to the laxity of the Governments in enforcing their laws.
It is very common in Italy to ascribe to the French occupation under the first Empire all the improvements and all the abuses of recent times, according to the political sympathies of the individual; and the French are often said to have prostrated every forest which has disappeared within this century. But, however this may be, no energetic system of repression or restoration was adopted by any of the Italian States after the downfall of the Empire, and the taxes on forest property in some of them were so burdensome that rural municipalities sometimes proposed to cede their common woods to the Government, without any other compensation than the remission of the taxes imposed on forest-lands. [Footnote: See the Politecnico for the month of May, 1862, p. 234.] Under such circumstances, woodlands would soon become disafforested, and where facilities of transportation and a good demand for timber have increased the inducements to fell it, as upon the borders of the Mediterranean, the destruction of the forest and all the evils which attend it have gone on at a seriously alarming rate.
Gallenga gives a striking account of the wanton destruction of the forests in Northern Italy within his personal recollection, [Footnote: "Far away in the darkest recesses of the mountains a kind of universal conspiracy seems to have been got up among these Alpine people,—a destructive mania to hew and sweep down everything that stands on roots."—Country Life in Piedmont, p. 134.
"There are huge pyramids of mountains now bare and bleak from base to summit, which men still living and still young remember seeing richly mantled with all but primeval forests."—Ibid., p. 135.] and there are few Italians past middle life whose own memory will not supply similar reminiscences. The clearing of the mountain valleys of the provinces of Bergamo and of Bescia is recent, and Lombardini informs us the felling of the woods in the Valtelline commenced little more than forty years ago.
Although no country has produced more able writers on the value of the forest and the general consequences of its destruction than Italy, yet the specific geographical importance of the woods, except as a protection against inundations, has not been so clearly recognized in that country as in the States bordering it on the north and west. It is true that the face of nature has been as completely revolutionized by man, and that the action of torrents has created almost as wide and as hopeless devastation in Italy as in France; but in the French Empire the recent desolation produced by clearing the forests is more extensive, has been more suddenly effected, has occurred in less remote and obscure localities, and therefore, excites a livelier and more general interest than in Italy, where public opinion does not so readily connect the effect with its true cause. Italy, too, from ancient habit, employs little wood in architectural construction; for generations she has maintained no military or commercial marine large enough to require exhaustive quantities of timber, [Footnote: The great naval and commercial marines of Venice and of Genoa must have occasioned an immense consumption of lumber in the Middle Ages, and the centuries immediately succeeding those commonly embraced in that designation. The marine construction of that period employed larger timbers than the modern naval architecture of most commercial countries, but apparently without a proportional increase of strength. The old modes of ship-building have been, to a considerable extent, handed down to very recent times in the Mediterranean, and though better models and modes of construction are now employed in Italian shipyards, an American or an Englishman looks with astonishment at the huge beams and thick planks so often employed in the construction of very small vessels navigating that sea, and not yet old enough to be broken up as unseaworthy.] and the mildness of her climate makes small demands on the woods for fuel. Besides these circumstances, it must be remembered that the sciences of observation did not become knowledges of practical application till after the mischief was already mainly done and even forgotten in Alpine Italy, while its evils were just beginning to be sensibly felt in France when the claims of natural philosophy as a liberal study were first acknowledged in modern Europe. The former political condition of the Italian Peninsula would have effectually prevented the adoption of a general system of forest economy, however clearly the importance of a wise administration of this great public interest might have been understood. The woods which controlled and regulated the flow of the river-sources were very often in one jurisdiction, the plains to be irrigated, or to be inundated by floods and desolated by torrents, in another. Concert of action, on such a subject, between a multitude of jealous petty sovereignties, was obviously impossible, and nothing but the permanent union of all the Italian States under a single government can render practicable the establishment of such arrangements for the conservation and restoration of the forests, and the regulation of the flow of the waters, as are necessary for the full development of the yet unexhausted resources of that fairest of lands, and even for the maintenance of the present condition of its physical geography.
The Forests of Germany.
Germany, including a considerable part of the Austrian Empire, from character of surface and climate, and from the attention which has long been paid in all the German States to sylviculture, is in a far better condition in this respect than its more southern neighbors; and though in the Alpine provinces of Bavaria and Austria the corresponding districts of Switzerland, Italy, and France, has produced effects hardly less disastrous, [Footnote: As an instance of the scarcity of fuel in some parts of the territory of Bavaria, where, not long since, wood abounded, I may mention the fact that the water of salt-springs is, in some instances, conveyed to the distance of sixty miles, in iron pipes, to reach a supply of fuel for boiling it down.
In France, the juice of the sugar-beet is sometimes carried three or four miles in pipes for the same reason.
Many of my readers may remember that it was not long ago proposed to manufacture the gas for the supply of London at the mouths of the coal- mines, and convey it to the city in pipes, thus saving the transportation of the coal; but as the coke and mineral tar would still have remained to be disposed of, the operation would probably not have proved advantageous.
Great economy in the production of petroleum has resulted from the application of cast-iron tubes to the wells instead of barrels; the oil is thus carried over the various inequalities of surface for three or four miles to the tanks on the railroads, and forced into them by steam-engines. The price of transport is thus reduced one-fifth.] yet, as a whole, the German States, as Siemoni well observes, must be considered as in this respect the model countries of Europe. Not only is the forest area in general maintained without diminution, but new woods are planted where they are specially needed, [Footnote: The Austrian Government is making energetic efforts for the propagation of forests on the desolate waste of the Karst. The difficulties from drought and from the violence of the winds, which might prove fatal to young and even to somewhat advanced plantations, are very serious, but in 1866 upwards of 400,000 trees had been planted and great quantities of seeds sown. Thus far, the results of this important experiment are said to be encouraging. See the Chronique Forestiere in the Revue des Eaux et Forets, Feb. 1870.] and, though the slow growth of forest-trees in those climates reduces the direct pecuniary returns of woodlands to a minimum, the governments wisely persevere in encouraging this industry. The exportation of sawn lumber from Trieste is large, and in fact the Turkish and Egyptian markets are in great part supplied from this source. [Footnote: For information respecting the forests of Germany, as well as other European countries, see, besides the works already cited, the very valuable Manuale d'Arts Forestale of Siemoni, 2de edizione, Firenze, 1872.]
Forests of Russia.
Russia, which we habitually consider as substantially a forest country—which has in fact a large proportion of woodland—is beginning to suffer seriously for want of wood. Jourdier observes: "Instead of a vast territory with immense forests, which we expect to meet, one sees only scattered groves thinned by the wind or by the axe of the moujik, grounds cut over and more or less recently cleared for cultivation. There is probably not a single district in Russia which has not to deplore the ravages of man or of fire, those two great enemies of Muscovite sylviculture. This is so true, that clear-sighted men already foresee a crisis which will become terrible, unless the discovery of great deposits of some new combustible, as pit-coal or anthracite, shall diminish its evils." [Footnote: Clave, Etudes sur l'Economie Forestiere, p. 261. Clave adds (p. 262): "The Russian forests are very unequally distributed through the territory of this vast empire. In the north they form immense masses, and cover whole provinces, while in the south they are so completely wanting that the inhabitants have no other fuel than straw, dung, rushes, and heath." … "At Moscow, firewood costs thirty per cent. more than at Paris, while, at the distance of a few leagues, it sells for a tenth of that price."
This state of things is partly due to the want of facilities of transportation, and some parts of the United States are in a similar condition. During a severe winter, ten or twelve years ago, the sudden freezing of the canals and rivers, before a large American town had received its usual supply of fuel, occasioned an enormous rise in the price of wood and coal, and the poor suffered severely for want of it. Within a few hours of the city were large forests and an abundant stock of firewood felled and prepared for burning.
This might easily have been carried to town by the railroads which passed through the woods; but the managers of the roads refused to receive it as freight, because a rival market for wood might raise the price of the fuel they employed for their locomotives. Truly, our railways "want a master."
Hohenstein, who was long professionally employed as a forester in Russia, describes the consequences of the general war upon the woods in that country as already most disastrous, and as threatening still more ruinous evils. The river Volga, the life artery of Russian internal commerce, is drying up from this cause, and the great Muscovite plains are fast advancing to a desolation like that of Persia.—Der Wald, p. 223.
The level of the Caspian Sea is eighty-three feet lower than that of the Sea of Azoff, and the surface of Lake Aral is fast sinking. Von Baer maintains that the depression of the Caspian was produced by a sudden subsidence, from ecological causes, and not gradually by excess of evaporation over supply. See Kaspische Studien, p. 25. But this subsidence diminished the area and consequently the evaporation of that sea, and the rivers which once maintained its ancient equilibrium ought to have raised it to its former level, if their own flow had not been diminished. It is, indeed, not proved that the laying bare of a wooded country diminishes the total annual precipitation upon it; but it is certain that the summer delivery of water from the surface of a champaign region, like that through which the Volga, its tributaries, and the feeders of Lake Aral, flow, is lessened by the removal of its woods. Hence, though as much rain may still fall in the valleys of those rivers as when their whole surface was covered with forests, more moisture may be carried off by evaporation, and a less quantity of water be discharged by the rivers since their basins were cleared, and therefore the present condition of the inland waters in question may be due to the removal of the forests in their valleys and the adjacent plains.]
Forests of United States.
I greatly doubt whether any one of the American States, except, perhaps, Oregon, has, at this moment, more woodland than it ought permanently to preserve, though, no doubt, a different distribution of the forests in all of them might be highly advantageous. It is, perhaps, a misfortune to the American Union that the State Governments have so generally disposed of their original domain to private citizens. It is true that public property is not sufficiently respected in the United States; and within the memory of almost every man of mature age, timber was of so little value in the northernmost States that the owners of private woodlands submitted, almost without complaint, to what would be regarded elsewhere as very aggravated trespasses upon them. [Footnote: According to the maxims of English jurisprudence, the common law consists of general customs so long established that "the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." In other words, long custom makes law. In new countries, the change of circumstances creates new customs, and, in time, new law, without the aid of legislation. Had the American colonists observed a more sparing economy in the treatment of their woods, a new code of customary forest-law would have sprung up and acquired the force of a statute. Popular habit was fast elaborating the fundamental principles of such a code, when the rapid increase in the value of timber, in consequence of the reckless devastation of the woodlands, made it the interest of the proprietors to interfere with this incipient system of forest jurisprudence, and appeal to the rules of English law for the protection of their woods. The courts have sustained these appeals, and forest property is now legally as inviolable as any other, though common opinion still combats the course of judicial decision on such questions.] Persons in want of timber helped themselves to it wherever they could find it, and a claim for damages, for so insignificant a wrong as cutting down and carrying off a few pine or oak trees, was regarded as a mean-spirited act in a proprietor. The habits formed at this period are not altogether obsolete, and even now the notion of a common right of property in the woods still lingers, if not as an opinion at least as a sentiment. Under such circumstances it has been difficult to protect the forest, whether it belong to the State or to individuals. Property of this kind is subject to plunder, as well as to frequent damage by fire. The destruction from these causes would, indeed, considerably lessen, but would by no means wholly annihilate the climatic and geographical influences of the forest, or ruinously diminish its value as a regular source of supply of fuel and timber.
It is evidently a matter of the utmost importance that the public, and especially land-owners, be roused to a sense of the dangers to which the indiscriminate clearing of the woods may expose not only future generations, but the very soil itself. Some of the American States, as well as the Governments of many European colonies, still retain the ownership of great tracts of primitive woodland. The State of New York, for example, has, in its north-eastern counties, a vast extent of territory in which the lumberman has only here and there established his camp, and where the forest, though interspersed with permanent settlements, robbed of some of its finest pine groves, and often ravaged by devastating fires, still covers far the largest proportion of the surface. Through this territory the soil is generally poor, and even the new clearings have little of the luxuriance of harvest which distinguishes them elsewhere. The value of the land for agricultural uses is therefore very small, and few purchases are made for any other purpose than to strip the soil of its timber. It has been often proposed that the State should declare the remaining forest the inalienable property of the commonwealth, but I believe the motive of the suggestion has originated rather in poetical than in economical views of the subject. Both these classes of considerations have a real worth. It is desirable that some large and easily accessible region of American soil should remain, as far as possible, in its primitive condition, at once a museum for the instruction of the student, a garden for the recreation of the lover of nature, and an asylum where indigenous tree, and humble plant that loves the shade, and fish and fowl and four-footed beast, may dwell and perpetuate their kind, in the enjoyment of such imperfect protection as the laws of a people jealous of restraint can afford them. The immediate loss to the public treasury from the adoption of this policy would be inconsiderable, for these lands are sold at low rates. The forest alone, economically managed, would, without injury, and even with benefit to its permanence and growth, soon yield a regular income larger than the present value of the fee.
The collateral advantages of the preservation of these forests would be far greater. Nature threw up those mountains and clothed them with lofty woods, that they might serve as a reservoir to supply with perennial waters the thousand rivers and rills that are fed by the rains and snows of the Adirondacks, and as a screen for the fertile plains of the central counties against the chilling blasts of the north wind, which meet no other barrier in their sweep from the Arctic pole. The climate of Northern New York even now presents greater extremes of temperature than that of Southern France. The long-continued cold of winter is more intense, the short heats of summer even fiercer than in Provence, and hence the preservation of every influence that tends to maintain an equilibrium of temperature and humidity is of cardinal importance. The felling of the Adirondack woods would ultimately involve for Northern and Central New York consequences similar to those which have resulted from the laying bare of the southern and western declivities of the French Alps and the spurs, ridges, and detached peaks in front of them.
It is true that the evils to be apprehended from the clearing of the mountains of New York may be less in degree than those which a similar cause has produced in Southern France, where the intensity of its action has been increased by the inclination of the mountain declivities, and by the peculiar geological constitution of the earth. The degradation of the soil is, perhaps, not equally promoted by a combination of the same circumstances, in any of the American Atlantic States, but still they have rapid slopes and loose and friable soils enough to render widespread desolation certain, if the further destruction of the woods is not soon arrested. The effects of clearing are already perceptible in the comparatively unviolated region of which I am speaking. The rivers which rise in it flow with diminished currents in dry seasons, and with augmented volumes of water after heavy rains. They bring down larger quantities of sediment, and the increasing obstructions to the navigation of the Hudson, which are extending themselves down the channel in proportion as the fields are encroaching upon the forest, give good grounds for the fear of irreparable injury to the commerce of the important towns on the upper waters of that river, unless measures are taken to prevent the expansion of "improvements" which have already been carried beyond the demands of a wise economy.
In the Eastern United States the general character of the climate, soil, and surface is such, that for the formation of very destructive torrents a much longer time is required than would be necessary in the mountainous provinces of Italy or of France. But the work of desolation has begun even there, and wherever a rapid mountain-slope has been stripped of wood, incipient ravines already plough the surface, and collect the precipitation in channels which threaten serious mischief in the future. There is a peculiar action of this sort on the sandy surface of pine-forests and in other soils that unite readily with water, which has excited the attention of geographers and geologists. Soils of the first kind are found in all the Eastern States; those of the second are more frequent in the exhausted counties of Maryland, where tobacco is cultivated, and in the more southern territories of Georgia and Alabama. In these localities the ravines which appear after the cutting of the forest, through some accidental disturbance of the surface, or, in some formations, through the cracking of the soil in consequence of great drought or heat, enlarge and extend themselves with fearful rapidity.
In Georgia and in Alabama, Lyell saw "the beginning of the formation of hundreds of valleys in places where the primitive forest had been recently cut down." One of these, in Georgia, in a soil composed of clay and sand produced by the decomposition in situ of hornblendic gneiss with layers and veins of quartz, "and which did not exist before the felling of the forest twenty years previous," he describes as more than 55 feet in depth, 300 yards in length, and from 20 to 180 feet in breadth. Our author refers to other cases in the same States, "where the cutting down of the trees, which had prevented the rain from collecting into torrents and running off in sudden land-floods, has given rise to ravines from 70 to 80 feet deep." [Footnote: Lyell, Principles of Geology, 10th ed., vol i., 345-6.] Similar results often follow in the North-eastern States from cutting the timber on the "pine plains," where the soil is usually of a sandy composition and loose texture.
American Forest-Trees.
The remaining forests of the Northern States and of Canada no longer boast the mighty pines which almost rivalled the gigantic sequoia and redwood of California; and the growth of the larger forest-trees is so slow, after they have attained to a certain size, that if every pine and oak were spared for two centuries, the largest now standing would not reach the stature of hundreds recorded to have been cut within two or three generations. [Footnote: The growth of the white pine, on good soil and in open ground, is rather rapid until it reaches the diameter of a couple of feet, after which it is much slower. The favorite habitat of this tree is light, sandy earth. On this soil, and in a dense wood, it requires a century to attain the diameter of a yard. Emerson (Trees of Massachusetts, p. 65), says that a pine of this species, near Paris, "thirty years planted, is eighty feet high, with a diameter of three feet." He also states that ten white pines planted at Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1809 or 1810, exhibited, in the winter of 1841 and 1842, an average of twenty inches diameter at the ground, the two largest measuring, at the height of three feet, four feet eight inches in circumference; and he mentions another pine growing in a rocky swamp, which at the age of thirty-two years, "gave seven feet in circumference at the but, with a height of sixty-two feet six inches." This latter I suppose to be a seedling, the others TRANSPLANTED trees, which might have been some years old when placed where they finally grew.
The following case came under my own observation: In 1824 a pine-tree, so small that a young lady, with the help of a lad, took it up from the ground and carried it a quarter of a mile, was planted near a house in a town in Vermont. It was occasionally watered, but received no other special treatment. I measured this tree in 1860, and found it, at four feet from the ground, and entirely above the spread of the roots, two feet and four inches in diameter. A new measurement in 1871 gave a diameter of two feet eight inches, being an increase of four inches in eleven years, a slower rate than that of preceding years. It could not have been more than three inches through when transplanted, and up to 1860 must have increased its diameter at the rate of about seven-tenths of an inch per year, almost double its later growth. In 1871 the crown had a diameter of 63 feet.
In the same neighborhood, elms transplanted in 1803, when they were not above three or four inches through, had attained, in 1871, a diameter of from four feet to four feet two inches, with a spread of crown of from 90 to 112 feet. Sugar-maples, transplanted in 1822, at about the same size, measured two feet three inches through. This growth undoubtedly considerably exceeds that of trees of the same species in the natural forest, though the transplanted trees had received no other fertilizing application than an unlimited supply of light and air.] Dr. Williams, who wrote about sixty years ago, states the following as the dimensions of "such trees as are esteemed large ones of their kind in that part of America" [Vermont], qualifying his account with the remark that his measurements "do not denote the greatest which nature has produced of their particular species, but the greatest which are to be found in most of our towns."
Diameter. Height.
Pine………. 6 feet, 247 feet.
Maple……… 5 " 9 inches \
Buttonwood…. 5 " 6 " |
Elm……….. 5 " |
Hemlock……. 4 " 9 " |
Oak……….. 4 " > From 100 to 200 feet.
Basswood…… 4 " |
Ash……….. 4 " |
Birch……… 4 " /
He adds a note saying that a white pine was cut in Dunstable, New Hampshire, in the year 1736, the diameter of which was seven feet and eight inches. Dr. Dwight says that a fallen pine in Connecticut was found to measure two hundred and forty-seven feet in height, and adds: "A few years since, such trees were in great numbers along the northern parts of Connecticut River." In another letter, he speaks of the white pine as "frequently six feet in diameter, and two hundred and fifty feet in height," and states that a pine had been cut in Lancaster, New Hampshire, which measured two hundred and sixty-four feet, Emerson wrote in 1846: "Fifty years ago, several trees growing on rather dry land in Blandford, Massachusetts, measured, after they were felled, two hundred and twenty-three feet." All these trees are surpassed by a pine felled at Hanover, New Hampshire, about a hundred years ago, and described as measuring two hundred and seventy-four feet. [Footnote: Williams, History of Vermont, ii., p. 53. Dwight s Travels, iv., p. 21, and iii, p. 36. Emerson, Trees of Massachusetts, p. 61. Parish, Life of President Wheelock, p. 56.] These descriptions, it will be noticed, apply to trees cut from seventy to one hundred and forty years since.
Persons, whom observation has rendered familiar with the present character of the American forest, will be struck with the smallness of the diameter which Dr. Williams and Dr. Dwight ascribe to trees of such extraordinary height. Individuals of the several species mentioned in Dr. Williams's table are now hardly to be found in the same climate, exceeding one-half or at most two-thirds of the height which he assigns to them; but, except in the case of the oak and the pine, the diameter stated by him would not be thought very extraordinary in trees of far less height, now standing. Even in the species I have excepted, those diameters, with half the heights of Dr. Williams, might perhaps be paralleled at the present time; and many elms, transplanted, at a diameter of six inches, within the memory of persons still living, measure four and sometimes even five feet through. For this change in the growth of forest-trees there are two reasons: the one is, that the great commercial value of the pine and the oak have caused the destruction of all the best—that is, the tallest and straightest— specimens of both; the other, that the thinning of the woods by the axe of the lumberman has allowed the access of light and heat and air to trees of humbler worth and lower stature, which have survived their more towering brethren. These, consequently, have been able to expand their crowns and swell their stems to a degree not possible so long as they were overshadowed and stifled by the lordly oak and pine. While, therefore, the New England forester must search long before he finds a pine fit to be the mast Of some great ammiral, beeches and elms and birches, as sturdy as the mightiest of their progenitors, are still no rarity.
[Footnote: The forest-trees of the Northern States do not attain to extreme longevity in the dense woods. Dr. Williams found that none of the huge pines, the age of which he ascertained, exceeded three hundred and fifty or four hundred years, though he quotes a friend who thought he had noticed trees considerably older. The oak lives longer than the pine, and the hemlock-spruce is perhaps equally long lived. A tree of this latter species, cut within my knowledge in a thick wood, counted four hundred and eighty-six, or, according to another observer, five hundred annual circles. Great luxuriance of animal and vegetable production is not commonly accompanied by long duration of the individual. The oldest men are not found in the crowded city; and in the tropics, where life is prolific and precocious, it is also short. The most ancient forest-trees of which we have accounts have not been those growing in thick woods, but isolated specimens, with no taller neighbor to intercept the light and heat and air, and no rival to share the nutriment afforded by the soil. The more rapid growth and greater dimensions of trees standing near the boundary of the forest, are matters of familiar observation. "Long experience has shown that trees growing on the confines of the wood may be cut at sixty years of age as advantageously as others of the same species, reared in the depth of the forest, at a hundred and twenty. We have often remarked, in our Alps, that the trunk of trees upon the border of a grove is most developed or enlarged upon the outer or open side, where the branches extend themselves farthest, while the concentric circles of growth are most uniform in those entirely surrounded by other trees, or standing entirely alone."—A. and G. Villa, Necessita dei Boschi pp. 17, 18.]
California fortunately still preserves her magnificent sequoias, which rise to the height of three hundred feet, and sometimes, as we are assured, even to three hundred and sixty and four hundred feet, and she has also pines and cedars of scarcely inferior dimensions. The public being now convinced of the importance of preserving these colossal trees, it is very probable that the fear of their total destruction may prove groundless, and we may still hope that some of them may survive even till that distant future when the skill of the forester shall have raised from their seeds a progeny as lofty and as majestic as those which now exist. [Footnote: California must surrender to Australia the glory of possessing the tallest trees. According to Dr. Mueller, Director of the Government Botanic Garden at Melbourne, a Eucalyptus, near Healesville, measured 480 feet in height. Later accounts speak of trees of the same species fully 500 feet in height. See Schleiden, Fur Baum und Wald, p. 21.
If we may credit late reports, the growth of the eucalyptus is so rapid in California, that the child is perhaps now born who will see the tallest sequoia overtopped by this new vegetable emigrant from Australia.]
European and American Trees compared.
The woods of North America are strikingly distinguished from those of Europe by the vastly greater variety of species they contain. According to Clave, there are in "France and in most parts of Europe only about twenty forest-trees, five or six of which are spike-leaved and resinous, the remainder broad-leaved." [Footnote: Etudes Forestieres, p. 7.] Our author, however, doubtless means genera, though he uses the word especes. Rossmassler enumerates fifty-seven species of forest-trees as found in Germany, but some of these are mere shrubs, some are fruit and properly garden trees, and some others are only varieties of familiar species. The valuable manual of Parade describes about the same number, including, however, two of American origin—the locust, Robinia pseudacacia, and the Weymouth or white pine, Pinus Strobus—and the cedar of Lebanon from Asia, which, or at least a very closely allied species, is indigenous in Algeria also. We may then safely say that Europe does not possess above forty or fifty native trees of such economical value as to be worth the special care of the forester, while the oak alone numbers more than thirty species in the United States, [Footnote: For full catalogues of American forest-trees, and remarks on their geographical distribution, consult papers on the subject by Dr. J. G. Cooper, in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1858, and the Report of the United States Patent Office, Agricultural Division, for 1860.] and some other North American genera are almost equally diversified. [Footnote: Although Spenser's catalogue of trees occurs in the first canto of the first book of the "Faery Queene"—the only canto of that exquisite poem actually read by most students of English literature—it is not so generally familiar as to make the quotation of it altogether superfluous:
VII.
Enforst to seeke some covert nigh at hand,
A shadic grove not farr away they spide,
That promist ayde the tempest to withstand;
Whose loftie trees, yclad with sommers pride,
Did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide,
Not perceable with power of any starr:
And all within were pathes and alleies wide,
With footing worne, and leading inward farr;
Faire harbour that them seems; so in they entered ar.
VIII.
And foorth they passe, with pleasure forward led,
Joying to heare the birdes sweete harmony.
Which therein shrouded from the tempest dred,
Seemd in their song to scorne the cruell sky.
Much can they praise the trees so straight and hy,
The sayling pine; the cedar stout and tall;
The vine-propp elm; the poplar never dry;
The builder oake, sole king of forrests all;
The aspine good for staves; the cypresse funerall;
IX.
The laurell, meed of mightie conquerours
And poets sage; the firre that weepeth still;
The willow, worne of forlorn paramours;
The eugh, obedient to the benders will;
The birch for shaftes; the sallow for the mill;
The mirrhe sweete-bleeding in the bitter wound;
The warlike beech; the ash for nothing ill;
The fruitfull olive; and the platane round;
The carver holme; the maple seeldom inward sound.
Although the number of SPECIES of American forest-trees is much larger than of European, yet the distinguishable VARIETIES are relatively more numerous in the Old World, even in the case of trees not generally receiving special care. This multiplication of varieties is no doubt a result, though not a foreseen or intended one, of human action; for the ordinary operations of European forest economy expose young trees to different conditions from those presented by nature, and new conditions produce new forms. All European woods, except in the remote North, even if not technically artificial forests, acquire a more or less artificial character from the governing hand of man, and the effect of this interference is seen in the constant deviation of trees from the original type. The holly, for example, even when growing as absolutely wild as any tree can ever grow in countries long occupied by man, produces numerous varieties, and twenty or thirty such, not to mention intermediate shades, are described and named as recognizably different, in treatises on the forest-trees of Europe.]
While the American forest flora has made large contributions to that of Europe, comparatively few European trees have been naturalized in the United States, and as a general rule the indigenous trees of Europe do not succeed well in our climate. The European mountain-ash—which in beauty, dimensions, and healthfulness of growth is superior to our own [Footnote: In the Northern Tyrol mountain-ashes fifteen inches in diameter are not uncommon. The berries are distilled with grain to flavor the spirit.]—the horse-chestnut, and the abele, or silver poplar, are valuable additions to the ornamental trees of North America. The Swiss arve or zirbelkiefer, Pinus cembra, which yields a well-flavored edible seed and furnishes excellent wood for carving, the umbrella-pine, [Footnote: The mountain ranges of our extreme West produce a pine closely resembling the European umbrella-pine.] which also bears a seed agreeable to the taste, and which, from the color of its foliage and the beautiful form of its dome-like crown, is among the most elegant of trees, the white birch of Central Europe, with its pendulous branches almost rivalling those of the weeping willow in length, flexibility, and gracefulness of fall, and, especially, the "cypresse funerall," might be introduced into the United States with great advantage to the landscape. The European beech and chestnut furnish timber of far better quality than that of their American congeners. The fruit of the European chestnut, though inferior to the American in sweetness and flavor, is larger, and is an important article of diet among the French and Italian peasantry. The walnut of Europe, though not equal to some of the American species in beauty of growth or of wood, or to others in strength and elasticity of fibre, is valuable for its timber and its oil. [Footnote: The walnut is a more valuable tree than is generally supposed. It yields one-third of the oil produced in France, and in this respect occupies an intermediate position between the olive of the south and the oleaginous seeds of the north. A hectare (about two and a half acres) will produce nuts to the value of five hundred francs a year, which cost nothing but the gathering. Unfortunately, its maturity must be long waited for, and more nut-trees are felled than planted. The demand for its wood in cabinet-work is the principal cause of its destruction. See Lavergne, Economie Rurale de la France, p. 253.
According to Cosimo Ridolfi (Lezioni Orali, ii., p. 424), France obtains three times as much oil from the walnut as from the olive, and nearly as much as from all oleaginous seeds together. He states that the walnut bears nuts at the age of twenty years, and yields its maximum product at seventy, and that a hectare of ground, with thirty trees, or twelve to the acre, is equal to a capital of twenty-five hundred francs.
The nut of this tree is known in the United States as the "English walnut." The fruit and the wood much resemble those of the American black walnut, Juglans nigra, but for cabinet-work the American is the more beautiful material, especially when the large knots are employed. The timber or the European species, when straight-grained, and clear, or free from knots, is, for ordinary purposes, better than that of the American black walnut, but bears no comparison with the wood of the hickory, when strength combined with elasticity is required, and its nut is very inferior in taste to that of the shagbark, as well as to the butternut, which it somewhat resembles.
"The chestnut is more valuable still, for it produces on a sterile soil, which, without it, would yield only ferns and heaths, an abundant nutriment for man."—Lavergne, Economie Rurale de la France, p. 253.
I believe the varieties developed by cultivation are less numerous in the walnut than is the chestnut, which latter tree is often grafted in Southern Europe.
The chestnut crop of France was estimated in 1848 at 3,478,000 hectolitres, or 9,877,520 Winchester bushels, and valued at 13,528,000 francs, or more than two million and a half dollars. In Tuscany the annual yield is computed at about 550,000 bushels.
The Tuscan peasants think the flour of the dried chestnut not less nutritious than Indian cornmeal, and it sells at the same price, or about three cents per English pound, in the mountains, and four cents in the towns.] The maritime pine, which has proved of such immense use in fixing drifting sands in France, may perhaps be better adapted to this purpose than any of the pines of the New World, and it is of great importance for its turpentine, resin, and tar. The epicea, or common fir, Abies picea, Abies excelsa, Picea excelsa, abundant in the mountains of France and the contiguous country, is known for its product, Burgundy pitch, and, as it flourishes in a greater variety of soil and climate than almost any other spike-leaved tree, it might be well worth transplantation. [Footnote: This fir is remarkable for its tendency to cicatrize or heal over its stumps, a property which it possesses in common with some other firs, the maritime pine, and the European larch. When these trees grow in thick clumps, their roots are apt to unite by a species of natural grafting, and if one of them be felled, although its own proper rootlets die, the stump may continue, sometimes for a century, to receive nourishment from the radicles of the surrounding trees, and a dome of wood and bark of considerable thickness be formed over it. The healing is, however, only apparent, for the entire stump, except the outside ring of annual growth, soon dies, and even decays within its covering, without sending out new shoots. See Monthly Report, Department of Agriculture, for October, 1872.] The cork oak has been introduced into California and some other parts of the United States, I believe, and would undoubtedly thrive in the Southern section of the Union. [Footnote: At the age of twelve or fifteen years, the cork-tree is stripped of its outer bark for the first time. This first yield is of inferior quality, and it employed for floats for nets and buoys, or burnt for lampblack. After this, a new layer of cork, an inch or an inch and a quarter in thickness, is formed about one in ten years, and is removed in large sheets without injury to the tree, which lives a hundred and fifty years or more. According to Clave (p. 252), the annual product of a forest of cork oaks is calculated at about 660 kilogrammes, worth 150 frances, to the hectare, which, deducting expenses, leaves a profit of 100 francs. This is about equal to 250 pound weight, and eight dollars profit to the acre. The cork oaks of the national domain in Algeria cover about 500,000 acres, and are let to individuals at rates which are expected, when the whole is rented, to yield to the state revenue of about $2,000,000.
George Sand, in the Histoire de ma Vie, speaks of the cork-forests in Southern France as among the most profitable of rural possessions, and states, what I do not remember to have seen noticed elsewhere, that Russia is the best customer for cork. The large sheets taken from the trees are slit into thin plates, and used to line the walls of apartments in that cold climate. On the cultivation and management of the cork oak, see Des Incendies et de la culture du Chene-liege, in Revue das Eaux et Forets for February, 1869.] the walnut, the chestnut, the cork oak, the mulberry, the olive, the orange, the lemon, the fig, and the multitude of other trees which, by their fruit, or by other products, yield an annual revenue, nature has provided Southern Europe with a partial compensation for the loss of the native forest. It is true that these trees, planted as most of them are at such distances as to admit of cultivation, or of the growth of grass among them, are but an inadequate substitute for the thick and shady wood; but they perform to a certain extent the same offices of absorption and transpiration, they shade the surface of the ground, they serve to break the force of the wind, and on many a steep declivity, many a bleak and barren hillside, the chestnut binds the soil together with its roots, and prevents tons of earth and gravel from washing down upon the fields and the gardens. Fruit-trees are not wanting, certainly, north of the Alps. The apple, the pear, and the prune are important in the economy both of man and of nature, but they are far less numerous in Switzerland and Northern France than are the trees I have mentioned in Southern Europe, both because they are in general less remunerative, and because the climate, in higher latitudes, does not permit the free introduction of shade trees into grounds occupied for agricultural purposes. [Footnote: The walnut, the chestnut, the apple, and the pear are common to the border between the countries I have mentioned, but the range of the other trees is bounded by the Alps, and by a well-defined and sharply drawn line to the west of those mountains. From some peculiarity in the sky of Europe, cultivated plants will thrive, in Northern Italy, in Southern France, and even in Switzerland, under a depth of shade where no crop, not even grass, worth harvesting, would grow in the United States with an equally high summer temperature. Hence the cultivation of all these trees is practicable in Europe to a greater extent than would be supposed reconcilable with the interests of agriculture. Some idea of the importance of the olive orchards may be formed from the fact that Sicily alone, an island scarcely exceeding 10,000 square miles in area, of which one-third at least is absolutely barren, has exported to the single port of Marseilles more than 2,000,000 pounds weight olive-oil per year, for the last thirty years.