316 FORESTS OF FRANCE. 
enough to be able to expend annually six hundred times that 
sum in the maintenance of its military establishments in times 
of peace—will secure the creation of new forest to the extent of 
about 200,000 acres, or one fourteenth part of the soil, where the 
restoration of the woods is thought feasible, and, at the same 
time, specially important as a security against the evils ascribed, 
in a great measure, to its destruction.* 
In 1865 the Legislative Assembly passed a bill amendatory of 
the law of 1860, providing, among other things, for securing the 
soil in exposed localities by grading, and by promoting the 
growth of grass and the formation of greensward over the sur- 
face. This has proved a most beneficial measure, and its adop- 
tion under corresponding conditions in the United States is 
most highly to be recommended. The leading features of the 
system are: 
1. Marking out and securing from pasturage and all other 
encroachments a zone along the banks and around the head of 
ravines. 
2. Turfing this zone, which in France accomplishes itself, if 
not spontaneously, at least with little aid from art. 
3. Consolidation of the scarps of the ravines by grading and 
wattling and establishing barriers, sometimes of solid masonry, 
but generally of fascines or any other simple materials at hand, 
across the bed of the stream. 
* Tn 1848 the Government of the so-called French Republic sold to the Bank 
of France 187,000 acres of public forests, and notwithstanding the zeal with 
which the Imperial Government had pressed the protective legislation of 1860, 
it introduced into the Legislative Assembly in 1865 a bill for the sale, and con- 
sequently destruction, of the forests of the state to the amount of one hundred 
million francs. The question was much debated in the Assembly, and public 
opinion manifested itself so energetically against the measure that the ministry 
felt itself compelled to withdraw it. See the discussions in L’ Aliénation des 
Fovréts deV Etat. Paris, 1865. 
The late Imperial Government sold about 170,000 acres of woodland between 
1852 and 1866, both inclusive. The other Governments, since the restoration of 
the Bourbons in 1814, alienated more than 700,000 acres of the public forests, 
exclusive of sales between 1836 and 1857, which are not reported,—Annuaire 
des Haua et Horéts, 1872, p. 9. 
