FORESTS OF FRANCE. ole 
it is known that, in some departments, that of Ariége, for in- 
stance, clearing has gone on during the last half-century at the 
rate of three thousand acres a year, and in all parts of the 
empire trees have been felled faster than they have grown. * 
The total area of France in Mirabeaw’s time, excluding Savoy, 
but including Alsace and Lorraine, was about one hundred and 
thirty-one millions of acres. The extent of forest supposed by 
Mirabeau would be about thirty-two per cent. of the whole ter- 
ritory. In a country and a climate where the conservative 
influences of the forest are so necessary as in France, trees 
must cover a large surface and be grouped in large masses, in 
order to discharge to the best advantage the various functions 
assigned to them by nature. The consumption of wood is 
rapidly increasing in that empire, and a large part of its terri- 
tory is mountainous, sterile, and otherwise such in character or 
situation that it can be more profitably devoted to the growth 
of wood than to any agricultural use. Hence it is evident that 
the proportion of forest in 1750, taking even Mirabeau’s large 
* Among the indirect proofs of the comparatively recent existence of exten- 
sive forests in France, may be mentioned the fact that wolves were abundant, 
not very long since, in parts of the empire where there are now neither wolves 
nor woods to shelter them. Arthur Young more than once speaks of the ‘‘ in- 
numerable multitudes” of these animals which infested France in 1789, and 
George Sand states, in the Histoire de ma Vie, that some years after the res- 
toration of the Bourbons, they chased travellers on horseback in the southern 
provinces, and literally knocked at the doors of her father-in-law’s country 
seat. HEugénie de Guérin, writing from Rayssac in Languedoc in 1831 speaks 
of hearing the wolves fighting with dogs in the night under her very windows. 
Lettres, 2d ed., p. 6. 
There seems to have been a tendency to excessive clearing in Central and 
Western, earlier than in South-eastern, France. Bernard Palissy, in the ecepte 
Véritable, first printed in 1563, thus complains: ‘‘When I consider the value 
of the least clump of trees, or even of thorns, I much marvel at the great 
ignorance of men, who, as it seemeth, do nowadays study only to break down, 
fell, and waste the fair forests which their forefathers did guard so choicely. 
I would think no evil of them for cutting down the woods, did they but re- 
plant again some part of them; but they care nought for the time to come, 
neither reck they of the great damage they do to their children which shall 
come after them.’’— Cijuvres Comptes de BERNARD PALIssy, 1844, p. 88, 
