CONTINENTAL NOTES FRANCE. 75 



In this connection it is satisfactory to see that the Chamber of 

 Deputies is alive to the great necessity of afforesting the catch- 

 ment areas of the great rivers, and the late tremendous floods 

 will, we think, do much to force this matter still further to the 

 front. The afforestation of mountains was, unless I am mis- 

 taken, begun in 1856, and several laws have been passed 

 about it. British foresters desiring to see a really most 

 interesting and magnificent work could scarcely do better than 

 to visit some of the " perimetres de reboisement " in the French 

 Alps, and elsewhere in France. We do not, indeed, suffer much 

 here from erosion on hill-sides or from the silting up of rivers 

 (as in the case of the Loire, or the Volga in Russia), but floods 

 are not unknown to us, and afforestation generally — more 

 especially the rewooding of hills — will always be of direct 

 interest to us. I suppose if the State were to launch out into 

 a real forest policy it would be principally in the hills of Scot- 

 land and Wales that the forests would be formed. Incidentally, 

 I should like to mention that the French have an excellent plan 

 of taking photographs, repeated at intervals of years, from fixed 

 bench-marks, thus clearly showing the progress that has been 

 made. This can be done, of course, not only with afforested 

 hill-sides, but with forest operations generally, as, for example, at 

 the period when an area has been just felled for, say, a seed- 

 felling, and again five, ten, fifteen, etc., years after. The writer 

 is himself doing this in Buckinghamshire, and looks forward to 

 interesting results. The great difficulty is to get clear, sharp- 

 cut pictures of forest growth ; pretty pictures are easy enough, 

 but that is not what one wants. 



One sees from the Revue that the stripping of oak bark has 

 become as unremunerative in France as it has with us. M.M. 

 Truchot and Melard have articles on this subject. What has 

 killed the industry in France is chiefly the importation of 

 Spanish chestnut and Quebracho wood for working up into 

 extract. One wonders, speaking without expert knowledge, 

 why, if direct tanning from the bark is unsuitable, it should not 

 do to make extract from oak bark. One would have thought 

 that when there is a considerable fall of oak it would pay to 

 send the bark to the extract factories. Surely the same 

 machinery would do for dealing with the bark as with the 

 imported materials. Of course rail charges in Britain are 

 unusually high, and bark is bulky. In point of fact, where 



