The schools at Munich, Tubingen and Giessen form part of the
universities at these places; that at Carlsruhe is attached to the
technical high school; the others are academies for the study of
forestry only, but there is a tendency to transfer them all to the
universities. The subordinate staff are trained for their work in
so-called silvicultural schools, of which a large number exist. In this
way the German forests have been brought to a high degree of
productiveness, but the material derived from them falls far short of
the requirements, although the forests occupy 26% of the total area of
the country; hence the net imports of timber amount already to 4,600,000
tons a year, and they are steadily rising.
_France._--The principal timber tree of France is the oak. The cork oak
is grown extensively in the south and in Corsica. The beech, ash, elm,
maple, birch, walnut, chestnut and poplar are all important trees, while
the silver fir and spruce form magnificent forests in the Vosges and
Jura Mountains, and the Aleppo and maritime pines are cultivated in the
south and south-west. About one-seventh of the entire territory is still
covered with wood.
Forest legislation took its rise in France about the middle of the 16th
century, and the great minister Sully urged the enforcement of
restrictive forest laws. In 1669 a fixed treatment of state forests was
enacted. Duhamel in 1755 published his famous work on forest trees.
Reckless destruction of the forests, however, was in progress, and the
Revolution of 1789 gave a fresh stimulus to the work of devastation. The
usual results have followed in the frequency and destructiveness of
floods, which have washed away the soil from the hillsides and valleys
of many districts, especially in the south, and the frequent
inundations of the last fifty years are no doubt caused by the
deforesting of the sources of the Rhone and Saone. Laws were passed in
1860 and 1864, providing for the reforesting, "_reboisement_," of the
slopes of mountains, and these laws take effect on private as well as
state property. Thousands of acres are annually planted in the
departments of Hautes and Basses Alpes; and during the summer of 1875,
when much injury was done by floods in the south of France, the Durance,
formerly the most dangerous in this respect of French rivers, gave
little cause for anxiety, as it is round the head waters of this river
that the chief plantations have been formed. While tracts formerly
covered with wood have been replanted, plantations have been formed on
the shifting sands or dunes along the coast of Gascony. A forest of
_Pinus pinaster_, 150 m. in length, now stretches from Bayonne to the
mouth of the Gironde, raised by means of sowing steadily continued since
1789; the cultivation of the pine, along with draining, has transformed
low marshy grounds into productive soil extending over an area of about
two million acres. The forests thus created provide annually some
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