1883.] THE FOREST QUESTION IN BUSSIA. Ill 



up. At the same time forests have been destroyed unnecessarily. 

 The clianged conditions ^v^ought by the emancipation of the serfs have 

 gradually led many of the landed proprietors to dispose of their 

 arboreal rights, with the result that vast forests have been converted 

 into firewood, the consequent lowering of market prices taking place 

 in order to enable the purchasers — not to satisfy a demand, but to 

 realise at almost any cost as speedily as possible. This readiness to put 

 wood into the market has createda sort of Fools' Paradise for the wood 

 consumers of to-day, and .left the task of paying the piper tu the con- 

 sumers of the future. 



Nor is the question of purely prospective importance. If, on the one 

 hand, the wasteful woodcutter has been raising the prices of the future, 

 on the other hand, lie has been doing the most serious injury to those 

 climatic conditions upon which agriculture and commerce so much 

 depend in a country like liussia. Cut down trees, and you at once 

 expose the bared land to the drying action of the wind ; water and 

 snow, instead of being left to moisten the ground, evaporate with 

 almost phenomenal rapidity. A liussian proverb — ' Wlien man 

 comes, water goes ' — shows that the process is not exclusively modern. 

 The disappearance of watercourses in Eussia lias been going on for 

 centuries. Lakes have evaporated to the last drop. In many parts 

 wells have gradually disappeared, and for want of water numerous 

 gardens and orchards have had to be abandoned. The sand steppe? 

 are supposed to be gradually disappearing, yet this is only true in a 

 very limited sense, if true at all ; the surest way of reducing the 

 agricultural value of any given territory being the destruction of 

 whatever trees it may happen to possess. Then there is the loss to 

 the rivers. Cut down trees, and you infallibly devote to evaporation 

 a part of the supply of the nearest watercourse. The river Tiligul is 

 an illustration. In 1825 it was represented on Paissian military maps 

 as being united to the sea by a broad mouth, and now at this very 

 spot there is an isthmus over which goes the post-road from Nikolaef 

 to Odessa. Formerly the Tiligul drove fifteen mills, big and little ; 

 to-day not one of them remains, the flow of the river having become 

 practically nil. The Volga also is beginning to give cause for serious 

 apprehension. In the spring it still runs broad and full after the 

 meltiuif of the ice, but in the autumn its waters are beginning to lack 

 sufficient depth in parts for free navigation. Whether this is due, to 

 some extent, to the multiplication of sand-banks or changes in 

 their levels is a question of not much importance here ; the effect is 

 the same and is clearly, if not wholly, traceable to the practice of 

 cutting down trees, not wisely but too well. Forests often protect 

 rivers, and even villages, from the encroachments of sand ; as a means 



