554 Forestry Quarterly. 



In a brief consideration as to what might be 



Property done for the small farmer (Bauer-peasant) 



Conditions to induce him to manage his woodlot better, 



in Greyerz gives us incidentally a few interest- 



Switzerland. ing glimpses into the history and present con- 



ditions of property rights in forests still to be 

 found in Switzerland. He uses them to 

 show the difficulties that meet the proposition to induce such 

 management with regular annual sales, etc. 



"Narrow and primitive — often uneconomical — are the condi- 

 tions of the small Alpine farmer, yet there is a certain poetic 

 glamor, the fascination of a dumb yet expressive language of the 

 past, which binds the son of the mountains to his glebe, his 

 patrimony." 



In 1400, one of the barons in financial need proposed to sell 

 one of the villages which owed him allegiance, Frutigen, to the 

 city of Bern. The people of Frutigen did not like to be sold and 

 bought themselves off at a big price — an exhibition of the jeal- 

 ousy with which they guarded their institutions. In the i6th 

 to i8th century the forest properties of such communities, al- 

 though paid for by them, were declared public forests by the 

 cantons, and only in the middle of last century were the com- 

 munes and peasants rehabilitated in full ownership ; the public 

 forest idea, however, remaining in so far as the support of the 

 school and church, bridges, etc., still rested on them. These 

 communal forests in some communities are limited in owner- 

 ship, that is; the use of the forest is a right attaching to given 

 farms ; in others, "whoever is 20 years old, and puts up his 

 own hearth and light in the realm of the community" participates 

 in the usufruct of the common property. 



In Frutigen, the old rights of user of the 14th and 15th century 

 were renewed in the sixties of last century. Here the ownership 

 was limited, i. e. attached to the owners of certain farms. The 

 forest was intended to furnish materials as needed, but with con- 

 ditions. "Who with his possessions borders on a mountain or 

 communal forest may not take wood farther away than two klaf- 

 ter from his fences ; also time and manner of exercising the rights 

 circumscribe them ; and commissioners determined to how much, 

 according to his special needs, this or that peasant might be en- 



