ECONOMY OF THE FOREST. 367 
provinces, and thereby to prevent the utter depopulation and 
waste with which that once fertile soil and genial climate are 
threatened. __ 
The objects of the restoration of the forest are as multi- 
farious as the motives that have led to its destruction, and as 
the evils which that destruction has occasioned. It is hoped 
that the replanting of the mountain slopes, and of bleak and 
infertile plains, will diminish the frequency and violence of 
river inundations, prevent the formation of new torrents and 
check the violence of those already existing, mitigate the ex- 
tremes of atmospheric temperature, humidity, and precipitation, 
restore dried-up springs, rivulets, and sources of irrigation, 
shelter the fields from chilling and from parching winds, arrest 
the spread of miasmatic efiluvia, and, finally, furnish a self- 
renewing and inexhaustible supply of a material indispensable 
to so many purposes of domestic comfort, and to the successful 
exercise of every art of peace, every destructive energy of 
war.* 
The Economy of the Forest. 
The legislation of European states upon sylviculture, and the 
practice of that art, divide themselves into two great branches 
—the preservation of existing forests, and the creation of new. 
Although there are in Europe many forests neither planted 
nor regularly trained by man, yet from the long operation of 
causes already set forth, what is understood in America and 
other new countries by the “ primitive forest,’ no longer exists 
in the territories which were the seats of ancient civilization 
and empire, except upon a small scale, and in remote and 
almost inaccessible glens quite out of the reach of ordinary 
observation. The oldest European woods are indeed native, 
* The preservation of the woods on the former eastern frontier of France, 
as a kind of natural abattis, was recognizel by the Government of that 
country as an important measure of military defence, though there have been 
conflicting opinions on the subject. 
