22 AMERICAN FORESTRY 



The further one gets towards Belgium the more clayey and richer the soil. 

 Near Aix-la-Chapelle, about fifteen miles west of Cologne, is a fine stand 

 of mature pure beech, then a small stand of spruce, and finally oak, all 

 doing well on a clayey-sand soil, the spruce being planted. A short distance 

 further on one passes a big planted spruce forest of 25-year trees abutting 

 for half a mile on the railroad with ten and twenty-foot fire lanes perpen- 

 dicular to the track every three-hundred feet. A bare open strip one hundred 

 feet wide, protected this forest from the locomotive fires. Speaking of fire 

 protection, I would like to note here that though this was near the end of 

 one of the most severe drouths Germany has known, no rain having fallen for 

 over nine weeks, I did not see a single forest fire except one down in the 

 Bohemian Switzerland, beyond the Saxon border, where a big one was rolling 

 acres of smoke up over the mountains near Tetschen-Bodenbach. But in all 

 Germany, though one could see for twenty miles each side of the track, not 

 a forest fire was in evidence. There was plenty of grass burns in the pro- 

 tective strips, but the lanes and trenches seemed to have automatically stopped 

 them from getting into the forests. 



IN BELGIUM 



Just outside of Aix-la-Chapelle there are large spruce and oak forests, 

 and shortly beyond you cross the border at Veviers into Belgium and prac- 

 tical forestry ends as suddenly as if one were transported to America. The 

 usual wild neglected forest, so familiar along the right of way at home began 

 to appear. Trees of all sizes and shapes and species rambled along together, 

 mostly crooked and worthless commercially, and giving no sort of yield 

 sylviculturally. About fifteen thousand feet to the acre would be about the 

 value of the cutting, whereas the German forests I had just passed would 

 run nearer sixty thousand, and ninety thousand is not at all uncommon. 



During the whole of seven hundred miles of travel in Germany, never 

 did I see a single tract of woodland neglected or one that was allowed to 

 exist without yielding up a revenue up to the full bearing power of the soil. 

 I saw hundreds of examples of German forestry, with practically all the 

 species represented except maritime pine; — the kiefer of the great sandy plains 

 of Prussia, the spruce and fir of Saxony, and the hardwoods of the Rhine, 

 but never a single acre of wasted forest land. And the fact that much of 

 it was on the railroad, with each its siding for swift and cheap transportation 

 spoke well for a quick and i)rofi table market, with but little expense inter- 

 vening between the ripe tree and the lumber mill. It was easy to realize 

 how Germany, with a total forest area of only thirty-five million acres, gets 

 an annual yield of four-and-a-half billion board feet, and no less remarkable, 

 to my mind, is the adaption of house building practice and of the industries 

 of Germany to the needs of its forestry so that nothing is wasted. It would 

 seem that, in the course of centuries of tree crops, the foresters and the 

 architects had gotten together to agree on the best way to use all the wood 

 that is grown on the soil. 



