Chapter III: The Woods (5)

If this vast mass of pulverized rock and earth were restored to the localities from which it was derived, it certainly would not obliterate valleys and gorges hollowed out by great geological causes, but it would reduce the length and diminish the depth of ravines of later formation, modify the inclination of their walls, reclothe with earth many bare mountain ridges, essentially change the line of junction between plain and mountain, and carry back a long reach of the Adriatic coast many miles to the west.[233]

It is, indeed, not to be supposed that all the degradation of the mountains is due to the destruction of the forests--that the flanks of every Alpine valley in Central Europe below the snow line were once covered with earth and green with woods, but there are not many particular cases, in which we can, with certainty, or even with strong probability, affirm the contrary.

We cannot measure the share which human action has had in augmenting the intensity of causes of mountain degradation, but we know that the clearing of the woods has, in some cases, produced within two or three generations, effects as blasting as those generally ascribed to geological convulsions, and has laid waste the face of the earth more hopelessly than if it had been buried by a current of lava or a shower of volcanic sand. Now torrents are forming every year in the Alps. Tradition, written records, and analogy concur to establish the belief that the ruin of most of the now desolate valleys in those mountains is to be ascribed to the same cause, and authentic descriptions of the irresistible force of the torrent show that, aided by frost and heat, it is adequate to level Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa themselves, unless new upheavals shall maintain their elevation.

It has been contended that all rivers which take their rise in mountains originated in torrents. These, it is said, have lowered the summits by gradual erosion, and, with the material thus derived, have formed shoals in the sea which once beat against the cliffs; then, by successive deposits, gradually raised them above the surface, and finally expanded them into broad plains traversed by gently flowing streams. If we could go back to earlier geological periods, we should find this theory often verified, and we cannot fail to see that the torrents go on at the present hour, depressing still lower the ridges of the Alps and the Apennines, raising still higher the plains of Lombardy and Provence, extending the coast still farther into the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, reducing the inclination of their own beds and the rapidity of their flow, and thus tending to become river-like in character.

There are cases where torrents cease their ravages of themselves, in consequence of some change in the condition of the basin where they originate, or of the face of the mountain at a higher level, while the plain or the sea below remains in substantially the same state as before. If a torrent rises in a small valley containing no great amount of earth and of disintegrated or loose rock, it may, in the course of a certain period, wash out all the transportable material, and if the valley is then left with solid walls, it will cease to furnish debris to be carried down by floods. If, in this state of things, a new channel be formed at an elevation above the head of the valley, it may divert a part, or even the whole of the rain water and melted snow which would otherwise have flowed into it, and the once furious torrent now sinks to the rank of a humble and harmless brooklet. "In traversing this department," says Surell, "one often sees, at the outlet of a gorge, a flattened hillock, with a fan-shaped outline and regular slopes; it is the bed of dejection of an ancient torrent. It sometimes requires long and careful study to detect the primitive form, masked as it is by groves of trees, by cultivated fields, and often by houses, but, when examined closely, and from different points of view, its characteristic figure manifestly appears, and its true history cannot be mistaken. Along the hillock flows a streamlet, issuing from the ravine, and quietly watering the fields. This was originally a torrent, and in the background may be discovered its mountain basin. Such _extinguished_ torrents, if I may use the expression, are numerous."[234]

But for the intervention of man and domestic animals, these latter beneficent revolutions would occur more frequently, proceed more rapidly. The new scarped mountains, the hillocks of debris, the plains elevated by sand and gravel spread over them, the shores freshly formed by fluviatile deposits, would clothe themselves with shrubs and trees, the intensity of the causes of degradation would be diminished, and nature would thus regain her ancient equilibrium. But these processes, under ordinary circumstances, demand, not years, generations, but centuries;[235] and man, who even now finds scarce breathing room on this vast globe, cannot retire from the Old World to some yet undiscovered continent, and wait for the slow action of such causes to replace, by a new creation, the Eden he has wasted.

_Mountain Slides._

I have said that the mountainous regions of the Atlantic States of the American Union are exposed to similar ravages, and I may add that there is, in some cases, reason to apprehend from the same cause even more appalling calamities than those which I have yet described. The slide in the Notch of the White Mountains, by which the Willey family lost their lives, is an instance of the sort I refer to, though I am not able to say that in this particular case, the slip of the earth and rock was produced by the denudation of the surface. It may have been occasioned by this cause, or by the construction of the road through the Notch, the excavations for which, perhaps, cut through the buttresses that supported the sloping strata above.

Not to speak of the fall of earth when the roots which held it together, and the bed of leaves and mould which sheltered it both from disintegrating frost and from sudden drenching and dissolution by heavy showers, are gone, it is easy to see that, in a climate with severe winters, the removal of the forest, and, consequently, of the soil it had contributed to form, might cause the displacement and descent of great masses of rock. The woods, the vegetable mould, and the soil beneath, protect the rocks they cover from the direct action of heat and cold, and from the expansion and contraction which accompany them. Most rocks, while covered with earth, contain a considerable quantity of water.[236] A fragment of rock pervaded with moisture cracks and splits, if thrown into a furnace, and sometimes with a loud detonation; and it is a familiar observation that the fire, in burning over newly cleared lands, breaks up and sometimes almost pulverizes the stones. This effect is due partly to the unequal expansion of the stone, partly to the action of heat on the water it contains in its pores. The sun, suddenly let in upon rock which had been covered with moist earth for centuries, produces more or less disintegration in the same way, and the stone is also exposed to chemical influences from which it was sheltered before. But in the climate of the United States as well as of the Alps, frost is a still more powerful agent in breaking up mountain masses. The soil that protects the lime and sand stone, the slate and the granite from the influence of the sun, also prevents the water which filters into their crevices and between their strata from freezing in the hardest winters, and the moisture descends, in a liquid form, until it escapes in springs, or passes off by deep subterranean channels. But when the ridges are laid bare, the water of the autumnal rains fills the minutest pores and veins and fissures and lines of separation of the rocks, then suddenly freezes, and bursts asunder huge, and apparently solid blocks of adamantine stone.[237] Where the strata are inclined at a considerable angle, the freezing of a thin film of water over a large interstratal area might occasion a slide that should cover miles with its ruins; and similar results might be produced by the simple hydrostatic pressure of a column of water, admitted by the removal of the covering of earth to flow into a crevice faster than it could escape through orifices below.

Earth or rather mountain slides, compared to which the catastrophe that buried the Willey family in New Hampshire was but a pinch of dust, have often occurred in the Swiss Italian, and French Alps. The land slip, which overwhelmed and covered to the depth of seventy feet, the town of Plurs in the valley of the Maira, on the night of the 4th of September, 1618, sparing not a soul of a population of 2,430 inhabitants, is one of the most memorable of these catastrophes, and the fall of the Rossberg or Rufiberg, which destroyed the little town of Goldau in Switzerland, and 450 of its people, on the 2d of September, 1806, is almost equally celebrated. In 1771, according to Wessely, the mountain peak Piz, near Alleghe in the province of Belluno, slipped into the bed of the Cordevole, a tributary of the Piave, destroying in its fall three hamlets and sixty lives. The rubbish filled the valley for a distance of nearly two miles, and, by damming up the waters of the Cordevole, formed a lake about three miles long, and a hundred and fifty feet deep, which still subsists, though reduced to half its original length by the wearing down of its outlet.[238]

On the 14th of February, 1855, the hill of Belmonte, a little below the parish of San Stefano, in Tuscany, slid into the valley of the Tiber, which consequently flooded the village to the depth of fifty feet, and was finally drained off by a tunnel. The mass of debris is stated to have been about 3,500 feet long, 1,000 wide, and not less than 600 high.[239]

Such displacements of earth and rocky strata rise to the magnitude of geological convulsions, but they are of so rare occurrence in countries still covered by the primitive forest, so common where the mountains have been stripped of their native covering, and, in many cases, so easily explicable by the drenching of incohesive earth from rain, or the free admission of water between the strata of rocks--both of which a coating of vegetation would have prevented--that we are justified in ascribing them for the most part to the same cause as that to which the destructive effects of mountain torrents are chiefly due--the felling of the woods.

In nearly every case of this sort the circumstances of which are known, the immediate cause of the slip has been, either an earthquake, the imbibition of water in large quantities by bare earth, or its introduction between or beneath solid strata. If water insinuates itself between the strata, it creates a sliding surface, or it may, by its expansion in freezing, separate beds of rock, which had been nearly continuous before, widely enough to allow the gravitation of the superincumbent mass to overcome the resistance afforded by inequalities of face and by friction; if it finds its way beneath hard earth or rock reposing on clay or other bedding of similar properties, it converts the supporting layer into a semi-fluid mud, which opposes no obstacle to the sliding of the strata above.

The upper part of the mountain which buried Goldau was composed of a hard but brittle conglomerate, called _nagelflue_, resting on an unctuous clay, and inclining rapidly toward the village. Much earth remained upon the rock, in irregular masses, but the woods had been felled, and the water had free access to the surface, and to the crevices which sun and frost had already produced in the rock, and of course, to the slimy stratum beneath. The whole summer of 1806 had been very wet, and an almost incessant deluge of rain had fallen the day preceding the catastrophe, as well as on that of its occurrence. All conditions then, were favorable to the sliding of the rock, and, in obedience to the laws of gravitation, it precipitated itself into the valley as soon as its adhesion to the earth beneath it was destroyed by the conversion of the latter into a viscous paste. The mass that fell measured between two and a half and three miles in length by one thousand feet in width, and its average thickness is thought to have been about a hundred feet. The highest portion of the mountain was more than three thousand feet above the village, and the momentum acquired by the rocks and earth in their descent carried huge blocks of stone far up the opposite slope of the Rigi.

The Piz, which fell into the Cordevole, rested on a steeply inclined stratum of limestone, with a thin layer of calcareous marl intervening, which, by long exposure to frost and the infiltration of water, had lost its original consistence, and become a loose and slippery mass instead of a cohesive and tenacious bed.

_Protection against fall of Rocks and Avalanches by Trees._

Forests often subserve a valuable purpose in preventing the fall of rocks, by mere mechanical resistance. Trees, as well as herbaceous vegetation, grow in the Alps upon declivities of surprising steepness of inclination, and the traveller sees both luxuriant grass and flourishing woods on slopes at which the soil, in the dry air of lower regions, would crumble and fall by the weight of its own particles. When loose rocks lie scattered on the face of these declivities, they are held in place by the trunks of the trees, and it is very common to observe a stone that weighs hundreds of pounds, perhaps even tons, resting against a tree which has stopped its progress just as it was beginning to slide down to a lower level. When a forest in such a position is cut, these blocks lose their support, and a single wet season is enough not only to bare the face of a considerable extent of rock, but to cover with earth and stone many acres of fertile soil below.[240]

In Switzerland and other snowy and mountainous countries, forests render a most important service by preventing the formation and fall of destructive avalanches, and in many parts of the Alps exposed to this catastrophe, the woods are protected, though too often ineffectually, by law. No forest, indeed, could arrest a large avalanche once in motion, but the mechanical resistance afforded by the trees prevents their formation, both by obstructing the wind, which gives to the dry snow of the _Staub-Lawine_, or dust avalanche, its first impulse, and by checking the disposition of moist snow to gather itself into what is called the _Rutsch-Lawine_, or sliding avalanche. Marschand states that, the very first winter after the felling of the trees on the higher part of a declivity between Saanen and Gsteig where the snow had never been known to slide, an avalanche formed itself in the clearing, thundered down the mountain, and overthrew and carried with it a hitherto unviolated forest to the amount of nearly a million cubic feet of timber.[241] The path once opened down the flanks of the mountain, the evil is almost beyond remedy. The snow sometimes carries off the earth from the face of the rock, or, if the soil is left, fresh slides every winter destroy the young plantations, and the restoration of the wood becomes impossible. The track widens with every new avalanche. Dwellings and their occupants are buried in the snow, or swept away by the rushing mass, or by the furious blasts it occasions through the displacement of the air; roads and bridges are destroyed; rivers blocked up, which swell till they overflow the valley above, and then, bursting their snowy barrier, flood the fields below with all the horrors of a winter inundation.[242]

_Principal Causes of the Destruction of the Forest._

The needs of agriculture are the most familiar cause of the destruction of the forest in new countries; for not only does an increasing population demand additional acres to grow the vegetables which feed it and its domestic animals, but the slovenly husbandry of the border settler soon exhausts the luxuriance of his first fields, and compels him to remove his household gods to a fresher soil. With growing numbers, too, come the many arts for which wood is the material. The demands of the near and the distant market for this product excite the cupidity of the hardy forester, and a few years of that wild industry of which Springer's "Forest Life and Forest Trees" so vividly depicts the dangers and the triumphs, suffice to rob the most inaccessible glens of their fairest ornaments. The value of timber increases with its dimensions in almost geometrical proportion, and the tallest, most vigorous, and most symmetrical trees fall the first sacrifice. This is a fortunate circumstance for the remainder of the wood; for the impatient lumberman contents himself with felling a few of the best trees, and then hurries on to take his tithe of still virgin groves.

The unparalleled facilities for internal navigation, afforded by the numerous rivers of the present and former British colonial possessions in North America, have proved very fatal to the forests of that continent. Quebec has become a centre for a lumber trade, which, in the bulk of its material, and, consequently, in the tonnage required for its transportation, rivals the commerce of the greatest European cities. Immense rafts are collected at Quebec from the great Lakes, from the Ottawa, and from all the other tributaries which unite to swell the current of the St. Lawrence and help it to struggle against its mighty tides.[243] Ships, of burden formerly undreamed of, have been built to convey the timber to the markets of Europe, and during the summer months the St. Lawrence is almost as crowded with vessels as the Thames.[244] Of late, Chicago, in Illinois, has been one of the greatest lumber as well as grain depots of the United States, and it receives and distributes contributions from all the forests in the States washed by Lake Michigan, as well as from some more distant points.

The operations of the lumberman involve other dangers to the woods besides the loss of the trees felled by him. The narrow clearings around his _shanties_[245] form openings which let in the wind, and thus sometimes occasion the overthrow of thousands of trees, the fall of which dams up small streams, and creates bogs by the spreading of the waters, while the decaying trunks facilitate the multiplication of the insects which breed in dead wood, and are, some of them, injurious to living trees. The escape and spread of camp fires, however, is the most devastating of all the causes of destruction that find their origin in the operations of the lumberman. The proportion of trees fit for industrial uses is small in all primitive woods. Only these fall before the forester's axe, but the fire destroys, indiscriminately, every age and every species of tree.[246] While, then, without much injury to the younger growths, the native forest will bear several "cuttings over" in a generation--for the increasing value of lumber brings into use, every four or five years, a quality of timber which had been before rejected as unmarketable--a fire may render the declivity of a mountain unproductive for a century.[247]

_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 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.[248] 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.[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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval kings, and the local "coutumes" of feudalism contained many severe and even inhuman provisions, adopted rather for the preservation of game than from any enlightened views of the more important functions of the woods. Ordericus Vitalis informs us that William the Conqueror destroyed sixty parishes, and drove out their inhabitants, in order that he might turn their lands into a forest,[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 Bonnemere 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 Bonnemere, even so good a monarch as Henry IV reenacted 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 larvae.[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, _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,[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 Clave, 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.