CONTINENTAL NOTES — FRANCE. 1 59 



after only two years, and found that in place of twenty-seven 

 years the resulting figure was forty years. This was astonishing 

 until it was recollected that one of the two years had been 

 a seed year. 



The Forest of Hardt has yet another difficulty to contend 

 with, namely, the fact that it grows upon the Rhine pebble beds, 

 which range from 30 to 150 metres in depth. It may be 

 imagined how particularly necessary it is to maintain the cover, 

 and also the forest floor. 



II.— M. Andre Bertin, chief of the Forest Mission to the 

 French Colonies, shows how the French must look to their 

 colonial forests to provide the means of meeting the great 

 needs induced by the war, and it would seem that what applies 

 to France applies also, in a sense, to us — we, too, have 

 insufficient local supplies. To reconstruct in the devastated 

 regions 250,000 buildings, the railways and the mines, to 

 complete the large works held up by the war, and to build 

 a good merchant fleet, will require the importation of eight 

 million cubic metres (a cubic metre is 35*32 cubic feet) a year. 

 For a period of ten years this would mean a payment of ten 

 thousand million francs, and if the material were obtained from 

 foreign countries the payment would have to be in gold, to 

 the great detriment of the exchange. Thus it is estimated that 

 eighty million cubic metres of wood must necessarily come from 

 French possessions outside France itself, since where the French 

 home forests have not been destroyed they have been very 

 heavily worked. At the same time other countries also need 

 great quantities of timber. Already in 1898, whereas France 

 imported three million cubic metres, England imported fifteen 

 million, Germany nine million, and Belgium two million. 

 Considering the real exhaustion of the exporting countries the 

 colonial forests must certainly be looked to. 



The colonial forests of France are supposed to cover some 

 ninety million hectares (i hectare = 2-47 acres), ten times the 

 area of the home forests, and about double the area of France. 

 Of these ninety million hectares sixty are found on the West 

 African coast. French North Africa and the French West 

 Indies can only supply themselves. There remain Madagascar, 

 Indo-China, and New Caledonia, but these places are distant. 

 Moreover, they would find better markets nearer at hand— as 

 in China or South Africa. 



