PURE FORESTS AND MIXED FORESTS. 21 



rock is the red sandstone of the Trias, and the soil is mostly poor 

 and sandy. From time immemorial the Spessart has been a forest 

 country. Formerly it was the haunt of famous robbers; thei'e 

 were no roads and few villages. That forest originally consisted 

 entirely of beech and oak. In old times the oak was mainly 

 wanted to make wine casks for the produce of the vineyards near 

 the Rhine and its tributaries. 



When the trees were felled, they were split up into cask-staves, 

 and these were taken down on mules or on men's backs. Large 

 glass-works were in those days in the Spessart, the beech timber 

 was burnt, and excellent glass was made of the potash and the 

 pure sand, which collects in the stream beds. The demand at that 

 lime was greater for the beech than for the oak. In the soil and 

 climate of the Spessart the beech grows with much greater vigour 

 than the oak, and under ordinary circumstances the oak is apt to 

 be suppressed and killed out by the beech. But the wholesale 

 cutting of the beech for the glass-works in old times favoured the 

 oak, and hence the great present value of these forests. The oak 

 has grown up in company with the beech, and has formed fine 

 tall stems. 



I have selected the Spessart as an instance of mixed woods, 

 because the principles which here regulate the cutting of the oak 

 are entirely different from those by which, in the kingdom of 

 Saxony, the management of the Spruce forests is governed. There 

 is a large ai'ea in the Spessart of magnificent old oak woods. 

 They are almost pure oak, with an underwood of beech. Their 

 origin dates back to that terrible time in Germany, the Thirty 

 Years' War. Happy is Great Britain because it never had a 

 thirty years' war. Germany to this day is a poor country, and it 

 is a poor country to a great extent because it was devastated from 

 one end to the other between 1618 and 1618. Before that war 

 the cattle in the fertile valleys that surround the Spessart had 

 been in the habit of making the higher parts of these hills their 

 high-level grazing-grounds during summer. These lands were to 

 a large extent stocked with open oak woods, with excellent 

 pasture under the scattered trees. The woods could not fill up 

 by self-sown seedlings, because the cattle trod down or nibbled 

 the young oaks. But during the Thirty Years' War the cattle 

 were slaughtered or driven away, and the result was, that when 

 the first mast year came round large masses of acorns were shed, 

 and the groiind got covered with young growth of oaks. That 



