A VISIT TO GERMAN FORESTS. 437 



fellings in the older woods over a number of years more than 

 their state of maturity indicated, because by so doing the 

 peasantry do not suffer from want of employment, the labour 

 supply is upheld, and the timber output is more equally 

 distributed. The servitudes with which the forests of the 

 Spessart are burdened are not, as a rule, severely felt, because 

 the region is thinly populated. Where this is not so, and par- 

 ticularly round the borders of the Spessart, coniferous forests 

 now prevail, in consequence of the abstraction of leaf -litter, which 

 has rendered the soil unfit for the growth of broad-leaved trees. 

 The Weymouth pine (Pinus Strobus) has done conspicuously well 

 in Bavaria ; its yield per acre is said to be in some cases even 

 greater than that of the spruce, and the appearance of some 

 mature woods of 100 years old lends encouragement to a more 

 universal adoption of this species. 



LyiDg north-east of the Spessart is the Rhon district. At 

 Briickenau, oak and beech are found on slopes with a southerly 

 aspect. The mixture of trees by groups, each formed by a single 

 species, is here preferred But when the oak begins to thin out — 

 usually about the sixtieth year — a soil-protecting underwood is 

 introduced. This, as a rule, consists of beech, but silver fir 

 and Weymouth pine have been tried with success on a small 

 scale. Oberbach, a forest district not far from Briickenau is 

 well known in this part of Germany for its natural regeneration 

 of ash. Over basaltic rock this species thrives well, blanks 

 which occur in the natural seeding being filled in with young 

 plants of ash and sycamore. At about twenty years old, these 

 woods are under-planted with beech, which thereafter grows up 

 together with the ash. One wood of spruce on this revier, 

 growing over a Ked Sandstone formation, astonishes even German 

 foresters: at 75 years old practically every tree is 100 feet high 

 and of proportionate girth. 



Saxony. 



From the oaks of the Spessart and the Scots pine of Northern 

 Germany it was quite a change to come into the spruce woods of 

 Saxony. The sylvicultural system generally in vogue is that of 

 High Forest, with a short rotation of 60 or 80 years, and with clear- 

 felling and subsequent regeneration by planting. Bunch plant- 

 ing used to be practised, but is now entirely abandoned, single 

 plants of four years old (transplanted at two years) being found 



