DEMAND FOR LUMBER. 355 
turn these circumstances to profitable account, combined to 
hasten the sacrifice of the remaining woods, and a waste was 
produced which hundreds of years and millions of treasure will 
hardly repair. 
In the era of savage anarchy which followed the benefi- 
cent reforms of 1789, economical science was neglected, and 
statistical details upon the amount of the destruction of woods 
during that period are wanting. But it is known to have been 
almost incaleulably rapid, and the climatic and financial evils, 
which elsewhere have been a more gradual effect of this 
cause, began to make themselves felt in France within three or 
four years after that memorable epoch.* 
Increased Demand for Lumber. 
With increasing population and the development of new in- 
dustries, come new drains upon the forest from the many arts 
for which wood is the material. The demands of the near and 
the distant market for this product excite the cupidity of the 
hardy forester, and a few years of that wild industry of which 
Springer’s “Forest Life and Forest Trees” so vividly depicts 
the dangers and the triumphs, suffice to rob the most inaccessible 
glens of their fairest ornaments. The value of timber increases 
with its dimensions in almost geometrical proportion, and the 
tallest, most vigorous, and most symmetrical trees fall the first 
sacrifice. This is a fortunate circumstance for the remainder 
of the wood ; for the impatient lumberman contents himself 
with felling afew of the best trees, and then hurries on to 
take his tithe of still virgin groves. 
* See BECQUEREL, Mémoire sur les Foréts, in the Mém. de ? Académie 
des Sciences, t. xxxv., p. 411 et seqgq. 
Similar circumstances produced a like result, though on a far smaller scale, 
in Italy, at a very recent period. Gallenga says: ‘‘ The destruction of the 
majestic timber [between the Vals Sesia and Sessera] dates no farther back than 
1848, when, on the first proclamation of the Constitution, the ignorant boor 
had taken it for granted that all the old social ties would be loosened, and 
therefore the old forest-laws should be at once set at naught.”—Oountry Life 
in Piedmont, p. 136. 
