FORESTS OF RUSSIA. 325 
of great deposits of some new combustible, as pit-coal or anthra- 
cite, shall diminish its evils.” * 
*CLavi, Etudes sur Economie Forestiére, p. 261. Clavé adds (p. 262): 
‘‘ The Russian forests are very unequally distributed through the territory of 
this vast empire. In the north they form immense masses, and cover whole 
provinces, while in the south they are so completely wanting that the inhabit- 
ants have no other fuel than straw, dung, rushes, and heath.” . . . ‘At 
Moscow, firewood costs thirty per cent. more than at Paris, while, at the dis- 
tance of a few leagues, it sells for a tenth of that price.” 
This state of things is partly due to the want of facilities of transportation, 
and some parts of the United States are in a similar condition. During a 
severe winter, ten or twelve years ago, the sudden freezing of the canals and 
rivers, before a large American town had received its usual supply of fuel, 
occasioned an enormous rise in the price of wood and coal, and the poor 
suffered severely for want of it. Within a few hours of the city were large 
forests and an abundant stock of firewood felled and prepared for burning. 
This might easily have been carried to town by the railroads which passed 
through the woods; but the managers of the roads refused to receive it as 
freight, because a rival market for wood might raise the price of the fuel 
they employed for their locomotives. Truly, our railways ‘‘ want a master.’’ 
Hohenstein, who was long professionally employed as a forester in Russia, 
describes the consequences of the general war upon the woods in that country 
as already most disastrous, and as threatening still more ruinous evils. The 
river Volga, the life artery of Russian internal commerce, is drying up from 
this cause, and the great Muscovite plains are fast advancing to a desolation 
like that of Persia.—Der Wald, p. 223. 
The level of the Caspian Sea is eighty-three feet lower than that of the Sea 
of Azoff, and the surface of Lake Aral is fast sinking. Von Baer maintains 
that the depression of the Caspian was produced by a sudden subsidence, 
from geological causes, and not gradually by excess of evaporation over sup- 
ply. See Kaspische Studien, p. 25. But this subsidence diminished the area 
and consequently the evaporation of that sea, and the rivers which once main- 
tained its ancient equilibrium ought to have raised it to its former level, if 
their own flow had not been diminished. It is, indeed, not proved that the lay- 
ing bare of a wooded country diminishes the total annual precipitation upon 
it; but it is certain that the summer delivery of water from the surface of a 
champaign region, like that through which the Volga, its tributaries, and the 
feeders of Lake Aral, flow, is lessened by the removal of its woods. Hence, 
though as much rain may still fall in the valleys of those rivers as when their 
whole surface was covered with forests, more moisture may be carried off by 
evaporation, and a less quantity of water be discharged by te rivers since 
their basins were cleared, and therefore the present condition of the inland 
waters in question may be due to the removal of the forests in their val!eys 
and the adjacent plains, 
