384 FOREST FIRES. 
Forest Fires. 
The difficulty of protecting the woods against accidental or 
incendiary fires is one of the most discouraging cireumstances 
attending the preservation of natural and the plantation of arti- 
ficial forests.* In the spontaneous wood the spread of fire is 
horns; and sometimes, in groves of more than a hundred hectares, not one 
pine is found uninjured by them.”—Revue des Deux Mondes, Mai, 1863, p. 157. 
Vaupell, though agreeing with other writers as to the injury done to the 
forest by most domestic animals and by half-tamed deer—which he illustrates 
in an interesting way in his posthumous work, The Danish Woods—thinks, 
nevertheless, that at the season when the mast is falling, swine are rather use- 
ful than otherwise to forests of beech and oak, by treading into the ground 
and thus sowing beechnuts and acorns, and by destroying moles and mice.— 
De Danske Skove, p. 12. Meguscher is of the same opinion, and adds that 
swine destroy injurious insects and their larvee.—Memoria, etc., p. 233. 
Beckstein computes that a park of 2,500 acres, containing 250 acres of 
marsh, 250 of fields and meadows, and the remaining 2,000 of wood, may 
keep 364 deer of different species, 47 wild boars, 200 hares, 100 rabbits, and 
an indefinite number of pheasants. These animals would require, in winter, 
123,000 pounds of hay, and 22,000 pounds of potatoes, besides what they 
would pick up themselves. The natural forest most thickly peopled with 
wild animals would not, in temperate climates, contain, upon the average, 
one-tenth of these numbers to the same extent of surface. 
* The disappearance of the forests of ancient Gaul and of medizval France has 
been ascribed by some writers as much to accidental fires as to the felling of 
the trees. Allthe treatises on sylviculture are full of narratives of forest 
fires. The woods of Corsica and Sardinia have suffered incalculable injury 
from this cause, and notwithstanding the resistance of the cork-tree to injury 
from common fires, the government forests of this valuable tree in Algeria 
have been lately often set on fire by the natives and have sustained immense 
damage. 
See an article by Ysabeau in the Annales Porestiéres, t. iii., p. 489; DELLA 
Marmora, Voyage en Sardaigne, 2d edition, t. i., p. 426; Rivista Forestale 
del Regno @ Italia, October, 1865, p. 474. 
Five or six years agoI saw in Switzerland a considerable forest, chiefly of 
young trees, which had recently been burnt over. I was told that the poor of 
the commune had long enjoyed a customary privilege of carrying off dead 
wood and windfalls, and that they had set the forest on fire to kill the trees 
and so increase the supply of their lawful plunder. 
The customary rights of herdsmen, shepherds, and peasants in European 
