58 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



M. Aubert now describes how, in the forests of West France, 

 they have abandoned this slow method of conversion, and 

 simply allowed the coppice to grow tall, making the last 

 felling under the coppice treatment one in which the 

 number of standards left is very considerable, involving the 

 retention of a large number of stems grown from coppice shoots. 

 The point is that this area is not at this moment regenerated ; 

 it is left as pole forest. The money return from this, last 

 coppice felling is of course poor, but in a few years the crop 

 will have grown sufficiently to need a thinning, and M. Aubert 

 quotes figures to show that the temporary loss is very quickly 

 changed into a gain. The old foresters thought it was necessary 

 to get rid of the coppice-grown forest entirely, and only begin 

 the new high-forest after the former was cleared away ; it was 

 deemed impossible ever to obtain a proper forest, capable of 

 attaining maturity, from coppice-grown trees. But M. Aubert 

 draws attention to the fact that stems of this origin, which have 

 reached considerable dimensions, are constantly to be met with. 



Thus in these particular forests they have adopted, apparently 

 with great success, a method of conversion into high-forest which 

 leaps right across the slow initial stages of the classic method, 

 and starts them, as it were, well forward in the rotation of 

 the new high-forest system. It is necessary, when doing this, 

 to get rid of the large-crowned, short-boled old standards of the 

 coppice regime, which, if left, are a source of embarrassment, 

 and which, being incapable of increasing their height-growth, 

 are rapidly passed by the younger stems standing around them. 

 Even supposing it to be true that coppice-grown trees cannot 

 live to the rotation of high-forest, and will begin to go off 

 relatively early, there would still be no objection to such 

 stems being allowed to grow forward as long as they profitably 

 may under a high-forest treatment. If they will not grow more 

 than, say, eighty years (counting from the year they sprang 

 from the stool), and cannot reach the 120-150 years of the 

 rotation, why then this first coppice-grown high-forest can close 

 its first rotation at eighty years. 



IV. M. Huffel gives in the Revue des Eaiix et Forets an 

 account of the very careful experiments made in Switzerland by 

 Engler on the effects of forest on water-flow. The place where 

 these experiments are taking place (for they are still in progress) 



