Chapter VI (7)

[276] In the _Recepte Veritable_, Palissy having expressed his indignation at the folly of men in destroying the woods, his interlocutor defends the policy of felling them, by citing the example of "divers bishops, cardinals, priors, abbots, monkeries, and chapters, which, by cutting their woods, have made three profits," the sale of the timber, the rent of the ground, and the "good portion" they received of the grain grown by the peasants upon it. To this argument, Palissy replies: "I cannot enough detest this thing, and I call it not an error, but a curse and a calamity to all France; for when forests shall be cut, all arts shall cease, and they which practise them shall be driven out to eat grass with Nebuchadnezzar and the beasts of the field. I have divers times thought to set down in writing the arts which shall perish when there shall be no more wood; but when I had written down a great number, I did perceive that there could be no end of my writing, and having diligently considered, I found there was not any which could be followed without wood." * * "And truly I could well allege to thee a thousand reasons, but 'tis so cheap a philosophy, that the very chamber wenches, if they do but think, may see that without wood, it is not possible to exercise any manner of human art or cunning."--_[OE]uvres de_ BERNARD PALISSY, p. 89.

[277] Since writing the above paragraph, I have found the view I have taken of this point confirmed by the careful investigations 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 because at least her southern provinces are more frequently visited both by extreme drought and by deluging rains.

[278] _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, six or seven 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 the opening of a new market for wood might raise the price of the fuel they employed for their locomotives.

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 geological 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 raise 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 evaporation from the surface of a champaign region, like that through which the Volga, its tributaries, and the feeders of Lake Aral flow, is increased 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, a less quantity of water may be delivered by them 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 basins.

[279] Rentzsch _(Der Wald, etc._, pp. 123, 124) states the proportions of woodland in different European countries as follows:

---------------+----------+-----------
| |Acres per
| Per cent.| head of
| |population.
---------------+----------+-----------
Germany | 26.58 | 0.6638
Great Britain | 5. | 0.1
France | 16.79 | 0.3766
Russia | 30.90 | 4.28
Sweden | 60. | 8.55
Norway | 66. | 24.61
Denmark | 5.50 | 0.22
Switzerland | 15. | 0.396
Holland | 7.10 | 0.12
Belgium | 18.52 | 0.186
Spain | 5.52 | 0.291
Portugal | 4.40 | 0.182
Sardinia | 12.29 | 0.223
Naples | 9.43 | 0.138
---------------+----------+-----------

Probably no European countries can so well dispense with the forests, in their capacity of conservative influences, as England and Ireland. Their insular position and latitude secure an abundance of atmospheric moisture, and the general inclination of surface is not such as to expose it to special injury from torrents. The due proportion of woodland in England and Ireland is, therefore, almost purely an economical question, to be decided by the comparative direct pecuniary return from forest growth, pasturage, and plough land.

In Scotland, where the country is for the most part more 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 that part of the French empire.

In giving the proportion of woodland to population, I compute Rentzsch's Morgen at .3882 of an English acre, because I find, by Alexander's most accurate and valuable Dictionary of Weights and Measures, that this is the value of the Dresden Morgen, and Rentzsch is a Saxon writer. In the different German States, there are more than twenty different land measures known by the name of Morgen, varying from about one third of an acre to more than three acres in value. When will the world be wise enough to unite in adopting the French metrical and monetary systems? As to the latter, never while Christendom continues to be ruled by money changers, who can compel you to part with your sovereigns in France at twenty-five francs, and in England to accept fifteen shillings for your napoleons. I speak as a sufferer. _Experto crede Roberto._

[280] 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.

In the United States, swarms of honey bees, on leaving the parent hive, often take up their quarters in hollow trees in the neighboring woods. By the early customs of New England, the finder of a "bee tree" on the land of another owner was regarded as entitled to the honey by right of discovery; and as a necessary incident of that right, he might cut the tree, at the proper season, without asking permission of the proprietor of the soil. The quantity of "wild honey" in a tree was often large, and "bee hunting" was so profitable that it became almost a regular profession. The "bee hunter" sallied forth with a small box containing honey and a little vermilion. The bees which were attracted by the honey marked themselves with the vermilion, and hence were more readily followed in their homeward flight, and recognized when they returned a second time for booty. When loaded with spoil, this insect returns to his hive by the shortest route, and hence a straight line is popularly called in America a "bee line." By such a line, the hunter followed the bees to their sylvan hive, marked the tree with his initials, and returned to secure his prize in the autumn. When the right of the "bee hunter" was at last disputed by the land proprietors, it was with difficulty that judgments could be obtained, in inferior courts, in favor of the latter, and it was only after repeated decisions of the higher legal tribunals that the superior right of the owner of the soil was at last acquiesced in.

[281] _Etude sur le Reboisement des Montagnes_, p. 5.

[282] "In America," says Clave (p. 124, 125), "where there is a vast extent of land almost without pecuniary value, but where labor is dear and the rate of interest high, it is profitable to till a large surface at the least possible cost; _extensive_ cultivation is there the most advantageous. In England, France, and Germany, where every corner of soil is occupied, and the least bit of ground is sold at a high price, but where labor and capital are comparatively cheap, it is wisest to employ _intensive_ cultivation. * * * All the efforts of the cultivator ought to be directed to the obtaining of a given result with the least sacrifice, and there is equally a loss to the commonwealth if the application of improved agricultural processes be neglected where they are advantageous, or if they be employed where they are not required. * * * In this point of view, sylviculture must follow the same laws as agriculture, and, like it, be modified according to the economical conditions of different states. In countries abounding in good forests, and thinly peopled, elementary and cheap methods must be pursued; in civilized regions, where a dense population requires that the soil shall be made to produce all it can yield, the regular artificial forest, with all the processes that science teaches, should be cultivated. It would be absurd to apply to the endless woods of Brazil and of Canada the method of the Spessart by "double stages," and not less so in our country, where every yard of ground has a high value, to leave to nature the task of propagating trees, and to content ourselves with cutting, every twenty or twenty-five years, the meagre growths that chance may have produced."

[283] It is often laid down as a universal law, that the wood of trees of slow vegetation is superior to that of quick growth. This is one of those commonplaces by which men love to shield themselves from the labor of painstaking observation. It has, in fact, so many exceptions, that it may be doubted whether it is in any sense true. Most of the cedars are slow of growth; but while the timber of some of them is firm and durable, that of others is light, brittle, and perishable. The hemlock spruce is slower of growth than the pines, but its wood is of very little value. The pasture oak and beech show a breadth of grain--and, of course, an annual increment--twice as great as trees of the same species grown in the woods; and the American locust, _Robinia pseudacacia_, the wood of which is of extreme toughness and durability, is, of all trees indigenous to Northeastern America, by far the most rapid in growth.

As an illustration of the mutual interdependence of the mechanic arts, I may mention that in Italy, where stone, brick, and plaster are almost the only materials used in architecture, and where the "hollow ware" kitchen implements are of copper or of clay, the ordinary tools for working wood are of a very inferior description, and the locust timber is found too hard for their temper. Southey informs us, in "Espriella's Letters," that when a small quantity of mahogany was brought to England, early in the last century, the cabinetmakers were unable to use it, from the defective temper of their tools, until the demand for furniture from the new wood compelled them to improve the quality of their implements. In America, the cheapness of wood long made it the preferable material for almost all purposes to which it could by any possibility be applied. The mechanical cutlery and artisans' tools of the United States are of admirable temper, finish, and convenience, and no wood is too hard, or otherwise too refractory, to be wrought with great facility, both by hand tools and by the multitude of ingenious machines which the Americans have invented for this purpose.

[284] _Etudes Forestieres_, p. 7.

[285] _Etudes Forestieres_, p. 7.

[286] For very 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.

[287] 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 shadie grove not farr away they spide,
That promist ayde the tempest to withstand;
Whose loftie trees, yelad 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 entred 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.

[288] 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 of 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 in the chestnut, which latter tree is often grafted in Southern Europe.

[289] 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 cicatrization 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.

[290] 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 is 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 once 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 francs, 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 a 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.

[291] 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. I cannot give statistical details as to the number of any of the trees in question, or as to the area they would cover if brought together in a given country. 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 of olive oil per year, for the last twenty years.

[292] It is hard to say how far the peculiar form of the graceful crown of this pine is due to pruning. It is true that the extremities of the topmost branches are rarely lopped, but the lateral boughs are almost uniformly removed to a very considerable height, and it is not improbable that the shape of the top is thereby affected.

[293] Besides this, in a country so diversified in surface--I wish we could with the French say _accidented_--as Italy with the exception of the champaign region drained by the Po, every new field of view requires either an extraordinary _coup d'[oe]il_ in the spectator, or a long study, in order to master its relief, its plans, its salient and retreating angles. In summer, the universal greenery confounds light and shade, distance and foreground; and though the impression upon a traveller, who journeys for the sake of "sensations," may be strengthened by the mysterious annihilation of all standards for the measurement of space, yet the superior intelligibility of the winter scenery of Italy is more profitable to those who see with a view to analyze.

[294] Copse, or coppice, from the French _couper_, to cut, signifies properly a wood the trees of which are cut at certain periods of immature growth, and allowed to shoot up again from the roots; but it has come to signify, very commonly, a young wood, grove, or thicket, without reference to its origin, or to its character of a forest crop.

[295] It has been recently stated, upon the evidence of the Government foresters of Greece, and of the queen's gardener, that a large wood has been discovered in Arcadia, consisting of a fir which has the property of sending up both vertical and lateral shoots from the stump of felled trees and forming a new crown. It was at first supposed that this forest grew only on the "mountains," of which the hero of About's most amusing story, _Le Roi des Montagnes_, was "king;" but it is now said that small stumps, with the shoots attached, have been sent to Germany, and recognized by able botanists as true natural products.

[296] Natural forests are rarely, if ever, composed of trees of a single species, and experience has shown that oaks and other broad-leaved trees, planted as artificial woods, require to be mixed, or associated with others of different habits.

In the forest of Fontainebleau, "oaks, mingled with beeches in due proportion," says Clave, "may arrive at the age of five or six hundred years in full vigor, and attain dimensions which I have never seen surpassed; when, however, they are wholly unmixed with other trees, they begin to decay and die at the top, at the age of forty or fifty years, like men, old before their time, weary of the world, and longing only to quit it. This has been observed in most of the oak plantations of which I have spoken, and they have not been able to attain to full growth. When the vegetation was perceived to languish, they were cut, in the hope that this operation would restore their vigor, and that the new shoots would succeed better than the original trees; and, in fact, they seemed to be recovering for the first few years. But the shoots were soon attacked by the same decay, and the operation had to be renewed at shorter and shorter intervals, until at last it was found necessary to treat as coppices plantations originally designed for the full-growth system. Nor was this all: the soil, periodically bared by these cuttings, became impoverished, and less and less suited to the growth of the oak. * * * It was then proposed to introduce the pine and plant with it the vacancies and glades. * * * By this means, the forest was saved from the ruin which threatened it, and now more than 10,000 acres of pines, from fifteen to thirty years old, are disseminated at various points, sometimes intermixed with broad-leaved trees, sometimes forming groves by themselves."--_Revue des Deux Mondes_, Mai, 1863, pp. 153, 154.

The forests of Denmark, which, in modern times, have been succeeded by the beech--a species more inclined to be exclusive than any other broad-leaved tree--were composed of birches, oaks, firs, aspens, willows, hazel, and maple, the first three being the leading species. At present, the beech greatly predominates.--VAUPELL, _Boegens Indvandring_, pp. 19, 20.

[297] _Etudes Forestieres_, p. 89.

[298] The grounds which it is most important to clothe with wood as a conservative influence, and which, also, can best be spared from agricultural use, are steep hillsides. But the performance of all the offices of the forester to the tree--seeding, planting, thinning, and finally felling and removing for consumption--is more laborious upon a rapid declivity than on a level soil, and at the same time it is difficult to apply irrigation or manures to trees so situated. Experience has shown that there is great advantage in terracing the face of a hill before planting it, both as preventing the wash of the earth by checking the flow of water down its slope, and as presenting a surface favorable for irrigation, as well as for manuring and cultivating the tree. But even without so expensive a process, very important results have been obtained by simply ditching declivities. "In order to hasten the growth of wood on the flanks of a mountain, Mr. Eugene Chevandier divided the slope into zones forty or fifty feet wide, by horizontal ditches closed at both ends, and thereby obtained, from firs of different ages, shoots double the dimensions of those which grew on a dry soil of the same character, where the water was allowed to run off without obstruction."--DUMONT, _Des Travaux Publics, etc._, pp. 94-96.

The ditches were about two feet and a half deep, and three feet and a half wide, and they cost about forty francs the hectare, or three dollars the acre. This extraordinary growth was produced wholly by the retention of the rain water in the ditches, whence it filtered through the whole soil and supplied moisture to the roots of the trees. It may be doubted whether in a climate cold enough to freeze the entire contents of the ditches in winter, it would not be expedient to draw off the water in the autumn, as the presence of so large a quantity of ice in the soil might prove injurious to trees too young and small to shelter the ground effectually against frost.

Chevandier computes that, if the annual growth of the pine in the marshy soil of the Vosges be represented by one, it will equal two in dry ground, four or five on slopes so ditched or graded as to retain the water flowing upon them from roads or steep declivities, and six where the earth is kept constantly moist by infiltration from running brooks.--_Comptes Rendus a l'Academie des Sciences_--t. xix, Juillet, Dec., 1844, p. 167.

The effect of accidental irrigation is well shown in the growth of the trees planted along the canals of irrigation which traverse the fields in many parts of Italy. They flourish most luxuriantly, in spite of continual lopping, and yield a very important contribution to the stock of fuel for domestic use; while trees, situated so far from canals as to be out of the reach of infiltration from them, are of much slower growth, under circumstances otherwise equally favorable.

In other experiments of Chevandier, under better conditions, the yield of wood was increased, by judicious irrigation, in the ratio of seven to one, the profits in that of twelve to one. At the Exposition of 1855, Chambrelent exhibited young trees, which, in four years from the seed, had grown to the height of sixteen and twenty feet, and the diameter of ten and twelve inches. Chevandier experimented with various manures, and found that some of them might be profitably applied to young, but not to old trees, the quantity required in the latter case being too great. Wood ashes and the refuse of soda factories are particularly recommended. I have seen an extraordinary growth produced in fir trees by the application of soapsuds.

[299] Although the economy of the forest has received little attention in the United States, no lover of American nature can have failed to observe a marked difference between a native wood from which cattle are excluded and one where they are permitted to browse. A few seasons suffice for the total extirpation of the "underbrush," including the young trees on which alone the reproduction of the forest depends, and all the branches of those of larger growth which hang within reach of the cattle are stripped of their buds and leaves, and soon wither and fall off. These effects are observable at a great distance, and a wood pasture is recognized, almost as far as it can be seen, by the regularity with which its lower foliage terminates at what Ruskin somewhere calls the "cattle line." This always runs parallel to the surface of the ground, and is determined by the height to which domestic quadrupeds can reach to feed upon the leaves. In describing a visit to the grand-ducal farm of San Rossore near Pisa, where a large herd of camels is kept, Chateauvieux says: "In passing through a wood of evergreen oaks, I observed that all the twigs and foliage of the trees were clipped up to the height of about twelve feet above the ground, without leaving a single spray below that level. I was informed that the browsing of the camels had trimmed the trees as high as they could reach."--LULLIN DE CHATEAUVIEUX, _Lettres sur l'Italie_, p. 113.

The removal of the shelter afforded by the brushwood and the pendulous branches of trees permits drying and chilling winds to parch and cool the ground, and of course injuriously affects the growth of the wood. But this is not all. The tread of quadrupeds exposes and bruises the roots of the trees, which often die from this cause, as any one may observe by following the paths made by cattle through woodlands.

[300] I have remarked elsewhere that most insects which deposit and hatch their eggs in the wood of the natural forest confine themselves to dead trees. Not only is this the fact, but it is also true that many of the borers attack only freshly cut timber. Their season of labor is a short one, and unless the tree is cut during this period, it is safe from them. In summer you may hear them plying their augers in the wood of a young pine with soft green bark, as you sit upon its trunk, within a week after it has been felled, but the windfalls of the winter lie uninjured by the worm and even undecayed for centuries. In the pine woods of New England, after the regular lumberman has removed the standing trees, these old trunks are hauled out from the mosses and leaves which half cover them, and often furnish excellent timber. The slow decay of such timber in the woods, it may be remarked, furnishes another proof of the uniformity of temperature and humidity in the forest, for the trunk of a tree lying on grass or plough land, and of course exposed to all the alternations of climate, hardly resists complete decomposition for a generation. The forests of Europe exhibit similar facts. Wessely, in a description of the primitive wood of Neuwald in Lower Austria, says that the windfalls required from 150 to 200 years for entire decay.-_-Die Oesterreichischen Alpenlaender und ihre Forste_, p. 312.

[301] VAUPELL, _Boegens Indvandring i de Danske Skove_, pp. 29, 46. Vaupell further observes, on the page last quoted: "The removal of leaves is injurious to the forest, not only because it retards the growth of trees, but still more because it disqualifies the soil for the production of particular species. When the beech languishes, and the development of its branches is less vigorous and its crown less spreading, it becomes unable to resist the encroachments of the fir. This latter tree thrives in an inferior soil, and being no longer stifled by the thick foliage of the beech, it spreads gradually through the wood, while the beech retreats before it and finally perishes."

The study of the natural order of succession in forest trees is of the utmost importance in sylviculture, because it guides us in the selection of the species to be employed in planting a new or restoring a decayed forest. When ground is laid bare both of trees and of vegetable mould, and left to the action of unaided and unobstructed nature, she first propagates trees which germinate and grow only under the influence of a full supply of light and air, and then, in succession, other species, according to their ability to bear the shade and their demand for more abundant nutriment. In Northern Europe, the larch, the white birch, the aspen, first appear; then follow the maple, the alder, the ash, the fir; then the oak and the linden; and then the beech. The trees called by these respective names in the United States are not specifically the same as their European namesakes, nor are they always even the equivalents of these latter, and therefore the order of succession in America would not be precisely as indicated by the foregoing list, but it nevertheless very nearly corresponds to it.

It is thought important to encourage the growth of the beech in Denmark and Northern Germany, because it upon the whole yields better returns than other trees, and particularly because it appears not to exhaust, but on the contrary to enrich the soil; for by shedding its leaves it returns to it most of the nutriment it has drawn from it, and at the same time furnishes a solvent which aids materially in the decomposition of its mineral constituents.

When the forest is left to itself, the order of succession is constant, and its occasional inversion is always explicable by some human interference. It is curious that the trees which require most light are content with the poorest soils, and _vice versa_. The trees which first appear are also those which propagate themselves farthest to the north. The birch, the larch, and the fir bear a severer climate than the oak, the oak than the beech. "These parallelisms," says Vaupell, "are very interesting, because they are entirely independent of each other," and each prescribes the same order of succession.--_Boegens Indvandring_, p. 42.

[302] When vigorous young locusts, of two or three inches in diameter, are polled, they throw out a great number of very thick-leaved shoots, which arrange themselves in a globular head, so unlike the natural crown of the acacia, that persons familiar only with the untrained tree often take them for a different species.

[303] The two ideas expressed in the text are not exactly equivalent, because, though the consumption of animal food diminishes the amount of vegetable aliment required for human use, yet the animals themselves consume a great quantity of grain and roots grown on ground ploughed and cultivated as regularly and as laboriously as any other.

The 170,000,000 bushels of oats raised in the United States in 1860, and fed to the 6,000,000 horses, the potatoes, the turnips, and the maize employed in fattening the oxen, the sheep, and the swine slaughtered the same year, occupied an extent of ground which, cultivated by hand labor and with Chinese industry and skill, would probably have produced a quantity of vegetable food equal in alimentary power to the flesh of the quadrupeds killed for domestic use. Hence, so far as the naked question of _amount_ of aliment is concerned, the meadows and the pastures might as well have remained in the forest condition.

[304] According to Clave (_Etudes_, p. 159), the net revenue from the forests of the state in France, making no allowance for interest on the capital represented by the forest, is two dollars per acre. In Saxony it is about the same, though the cost of administration is twice as much as in France; in Wuertemberg it is about a dollar an acre; and in Prussia, where half the income is consumed in the expenses of administration, it sinks to less than half a dollar. This low rate in Prussia is partly explained by the fact that a considerable proportion of the annual product of wood is either conceded to persons claiming prescriptive rights, or sold, at a very small price, to the poor. Taking into account the capital invested in forest land, and adding interest upon it, Pressler calculates that a pine wood, managed with a view to felling it when eighty years old, would yield only one eighth of one per cent. annual profit; a fir wood, at one hundred years, one sixth of one per cent.; a beech wood, at one hundred and twenty years, one fourth of one per cent. The same author (p. 335) gives the net income of the New forest in England, over and above expenses, interest not computed, at twenty-five cents per acre only. In America, where no expense is bestowed upon the woods, the annual growth would generally be estimated much higher.

[305] It is rare that a middle-aged American dies in the house where he was born, or an old man even in that which he has built; and this is scarcely less true of the rural districts, where every man owns his habitation, than of the city, where the majority live in hired houses. This life of incessant flitting is unfavorable for the execution of permanent improvements of every sort, and especially of those which, like the forest, are slow in repaying any part of the capital expended in them. It requires a very generous spirit in a landholder to plant a wood on a farm he expects to sell, or which he knows will pass out of the hands of his descendants at his death. But the very fact of having begun a plantation would attach the proprietor more strongly to the soil for which he had made such a sacrifice; and the paternal acres would have a greater value in the eyes of a succeeding generation, if thus improved and beautified by the labors of those from whom they were inherited. Landed property, therefore, the transfer of which is happily free from every legal impediment or restriction in the United States, would find, in the feelings thus prompted, a moral check against a too frequent change of owners, and would tend to remain long enough in one proprietor or one family to admit of gradual improvements which would increase its value both to the possessor and to the state.

[306] It has been often asserted by eminent writers that a part of the fens in Lincolnshire was reclaimed by sea dikes under the government of the Romans. I have found no ancient authority in support of this allegation, nor can I refer to any passage in Roman literature in which sea dikes are expressly mentioned otherwise than as walls or piers, except that in Pliny (_Hist. Nat._ xxxvi, 24), where it is said that the Tyrrhenian sea was excluded from the Lucrine lake by dikes.

[307] A friend has recently suggested to me an interesting illustration of the applicability of military instrumentalities to pacific art. The sale of gunpowder in the United States, he informs me, is smaller since the commencement of the present rebellion than before, because the war has caused the suspension of many public and private improvements, in the execution of which great quantities of powder were used for blasting.

It is alleged that the same observation was made in France during the Crimean war, and that, in general, not ten per cent. of the powder manufactured on either side of the Atlantic is employed for military purposes.

It is a fact not creditable to the moral sense of modern civilization, that very many of the most important improvements in machinery and the working of metals have originated in the necessities of war, and that man's highest ingenuity has been shown, and many of his most remarkable triumphs over natural forces achieved, in the contrivance of engines for the destruction of his fellow man. The military material employed by the first Napoleon has become, in less than two generations, nearly as obsolete as the sling and stone of the shepherd, and attack and defence now begin at distances to which, half a century ago, military reconnoissances hardly extended. Upon a partial view of the subject, the human race seems destined to become its own executioner--on the one hand, exhausting the capacity of the earth to furnish sustenance to her taskmaster; on the other, compensating diminished production by inventing more efficient methods of exterminating the consumer.

But war develops great civil virtues, and brings into action a degree and kind of physical energy which seldom fails to awaken a new intellectual life in a people that achieves great moral and political results through great heroism and endurance and perseverance. Domestic corruption has destroyed more nations than foreign invasion, and a people is rarely conquered till it has deserved subjugation.

[308] STARING, _Voormaals en Thans_, p. 150.

[309] Idem, p. 163. Much the largest proportion of the lands so reclaimed, though for the most part lying above low-water tidemark, are at a lower level than the Lincolnshire fens, and more subject to inundation from the irruptions of the sea.

[310] _Die Inseln und Marschen der Herzogthuemer Schleswig und Holstein_, iii, p. 151.

[311] The purely agricultural island of Pelworm, off the coast of Schleswig, containing about 10,000 acres, annually expends for the maintenance of its dikes not less than L6,000 sterling, or nearly $30,000.--J. G. KOHL, _Inseln und Marschen Schleswig's und Holstein's_, ii, p. 394.

The original cost of the dikes of Pelworm is not stated.

"The greatest part of the province of Zeeland is protected by dikes measuring 250 miles in length, the maintenance of which costs, in ordinary years, more than a million guilders [above $400,000]. * * * The annual expenditure for dikes and hydraulic works in Holland is from five to seven million guilders" [$2,000,000 to $2,800,000].--WILD, _Die Niederlande_, i, p. 62.

One is not sorry to learn that the Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands had some compensations. The great chain of ring dikes which surrounds a large part of Zeeland is due to the energy of Caspar de Robles, the Spanish governor of that province, who in 1570 ordered the construction of these works at the public expense, as a substitute for the private embankments which had previously partially served the same purpose.--WILD, _Die Niederlande_, i, p. 62.

[312] STARING, _Voormaals en Thans_, p. 163.

[313] _Voormaals en Thans_, pp. 150, 151.

[314] STARING, _Voormaals en Thans_, p. 152. Kohl states that the peninsula of Diksand on the coast of Holstein consisted, at the close of the last century, of several islands measuring together less than five thousand acres. In 1837 they had been connected with the mainland, and had nearly doubled in area.--_Inseln u. Marschen Schlesw. Holst._, iii, p. 262.

[315] The most instructive and entertaining of tourists, J. G. Kohl--so aptly characterized by Davies as the "Herodotus of modern Europe"--furnishes a great amount of interesting information on the dikes of the Low German seacoast, in his _Inseln und Marschen der Herzogthuemer Schleswig und Holstein_. I am acquainted with no popular work on this subject which the reader can consult with greater profit. See also STARING, _Voormaals en Thans_, and _De Bodem van Nederland_, on the dikes of the Netherlands.

[316] The inclination varies from one foot rise in four of base to one foot in fourteen.--KOHL, iii, p. 210.

[317] The dikes are sometimes founded upon piles, and sometimes protected by one or more rows of piles driven deeply down into the bed of the sea in front of them. "Triple rows of piles of Scandinavian pine," says Wild, "have been driven down along the coast of Friesland, where there are no dunes, for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles. The piles are bound together by strong cross timbers and iron clamps, and the interstices filled with stones. The ground adjacent to the piling is secured with fascines, and at exposed points heavy blocks of stone are heaped up as an additional protection. The earth dike is built behind the mighty bulwark of this breakwater, and its foot also is fortified with stones." * * * "The great Helder dike is about five miles long and forty feet wide at the top, along which runs a good road. It slopes down two hundred feet into the sea, at an angle of forty degrees. The highest waves do not reach the summit, the lowest always cover its base. At certain distances, immense buttresses, of a height and width proportioned to those of the dike, and even more strongly built, run several hundred feet out into the rolling sea. This gigantic artificial coast is entirely composed of Norwegian granite."--WILD, _Die Niederlande_, i, pp. 61, 62.

[318] The shaking of the ground, even when loaded with large buildings, by the passage of heavy carriages or artillery, or by the march of a body of cavalry or even infantry, shows that such causes may produce important mechanical effects on the condition of the soil. The bogs in the Netherlands, as in most other countries, contain large numbers of fallen trees, buried to a certain depth by earth and vegetable mould. When the bogs are dry enough to serve as pastures, it is observed that trunks of these ancient trees rise of themselves to the surface. Staring ascribes this singular phenomenon to the agitation of the ground by the tread of cattle. "When roadbeds," observes he, "are constructed of gravel and pebbles of different sizes, and these latter are placed at the bottom without being broken and rolled hard together, they are soon brought to the top by the effect of travel on the road. Lying loosely, they undergo some motion from the passage of every wagon wheel and the tread of every horse that passes over them. This motion is an oscillation or partial rolling, and as one side of a pebble is raised, a little fine sand or earth is forced under it, and the frequent repetition of this process by cattle or carriages moving in opposite directions brings it at last to the surface. We may suppose that a similar effect is produced on the stems of trees in the bogs by the tread of animals."--_De Bodem van Nederland_, i, pp. 75, 76.

It is observed in the Northern United States, that when soils containing pebbles are cleared and cultivated, and the stones removed from the surface, new pebbles, and even bowlders of many pounds weight, continue to show themselves above the ground, every spring, for a long series of years. In clayey soils the fence posts are thrown up in a similar way, and it is not uncommon to see the lower rail of a fence thus gradually raised a foot or even two feet above the ground. This rising of stones and fences is popularly ascribed to the action of the severe frosts of that climate. The expansion of the ground, in freezing, it is said, raises its surface, and, with the surface, objects lying near or connected with it. When the soil thaws in the spring, it settles back again to its former level, while the pebbles and posts are prevented from sinking as low as before by loose earth which has fallen under them. The fact that the elevation spoken of is observed only in the spring, gives countenance to this theory, which is perhaps applicable also to the cases stated by Staring, and it is probable that the two causes above assigned concur in producing the effect.

The question of the subsidence of the Netherlandish coast has been much discussed. Not to mention earlier geologists, Venema, in several essays, and particularly in _Het Dalen van de Noordelijke Kuststreken van ons Land_, 1854, adduces many facts and arguments to prove a slow sinking of the northern provinces of Holland. Laveleye (_Affaissement du sol et envasement des fleuves survenus dans les temps historiques_, 1859), upon a still fuller investigation, arrives at the same conclusion. The eminent geologist Staring, however, who briefly refers to the subject in _De Bodem van Nederland_, i, p. 356 _et seqq._, does not consider the evidence sufficient to prove anything more than the sinking of the surface of the polders from drying and consolidation.

[319] The elevation of the lands enclosed by dikes--or _polders_, as they are called in Holland--above low water mark, depends upon the height of the tides, or, in other words, upon, the difference between ebb and flood. The tide cannot deposit earth higher than it flows, and after the ground is once enclosed, the decay of the vegetables grown upon it and the addition of manures do not compensate the depression occasioned by drying and consolidation. On the coast of Zeeland and the islands of South Holland, the tides, and of course the surface of the lands deposited by them, are so high that the polders can be drained by ditching and sluices, but at other points, as in the enclosed grounds of North Holland on the Zuiderzee, where the tide rises but three feet or even less, pumping is necessary from the beginning.--STARING, _Voormaals en Thans_, p. 152.

[320] The principal engine--called the Leeghwater, from the name of an engineer who had proposed the draining of the lake in 1641--was of 500 horse power, and drove eleven pumps making six strokes per minute. Each pump raised six cubic metres, or nearly eight cubic yards of water to the stroke, amounting in all to 23,760 cubic metres, or above 31,000 cubic yards, the hour.--WILD, _Die Niederlande_, i, p. 87.

[321] In England and New England, where the marshes have been already drained or are of comparatively small extent, the existence of large floating islands seems incredible, and has sometimes been treated as a fable, but no geographical fact is better established. Kohl (_Inseln und Marschen Schleswig-Holsteins_, iii, p. 309) reminds us that Pliny mentions among the wonders of Germany the floating islands, covered with trees, which met the Roman fleets at the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser. Our author speaks also of having visited, in the territory of Bremen, floating moors, bearing not only houses but whole villages. At low stages of the water these moors rest upon a bed of sand, but are raised from six to ten feet by the high water of spring, and remain afloat until, in the course of the summer, the water beneath is exhausted by evaporation and drainage, when they sink down upon the sand again. See _Appendix_, No. 40.