304 FOEESTS OF FEAISTCE. 



comparatively speaking, with an infertile soil, can tolerate the 

 continued withdrawal of a great portion of the territory from the 

 cultivation of trees and from other kinds of rural economy, 

 merely to allow wealthy individuals to amuse themselves with 

 field-sports. In Scotland, 2,000,000 acres, as well suited to the 

 growth of forests and for pasture as is the soil generally, are 

 withheld from agriculture, that they may be given up to herds of 

 deer protected by the game laws. A single nobleman, for ex 

 ample, thus appropriates for his own pleasures not less than 100,- 

 000 acres.* In this way one-tenth of all the land of Scotland is 

 rendered valueless in an economical point of view — for the re- 

 turns from the sale of the venison and other game scarcely suffice 

 to pay the gamekeepers and other incidental expenses — and in 

 these so-called forests there grows neither building timber nor 

 firewood worth the cutting, as the animals destroy the young 

 shoots. 



Forests of Frcmce. 



The preservation of the woods was one of the wise measures 

 recommended to France by SuUy, in the time of Henry IV., but 

 the advice was little heeded, and the destruction of the forests 

 went on with such alarming rapidity, that, two generations later, 

 Colbert uttered the prediction : " France will perisli for want of 

 wood." StiU, the extent of wooded soil was very great, and the 

 evils attending its diminution were not so sensibly felt, that either 

 the government or pubhc opinion saw the necessity of authorita- 

 tive interference, and in 1T50 Mh'abeau estimated the remaining 

 forests of the kingdom at seventeen millions of hectares [42,000,000 

 acres]. In 1860 they were reduced to eight mUhons [19,769,000 

 acres], or at the rate of 82,000 hectares [202,600 acres] per year. 



* Robertson, Our Deer Forests. London, 1867. 



The Italie of April, 1877, says: "English official documents furnish some 

 curious information with regard to landed property in Scotland — a country 

 in which, it is understood, such property is less divided than in most others. 

 Of the three millions of inhabitants which Scotland contains, only 132,000 are 

 landed proprietors, and of these there are only 19,000 who own more than a 

 single English acre. The total superficies of the soil, which is 18,945,547 

 acres, gives an average annual income of 18,688,065 pounds sterling, that is, 

 something less than one pound sterling per acre. More than one-quarter of the 

 whole country is owned by twenty-four proprietors, and the estate of one of 

 these covers 1,326,453 acres." 



