Science ' and Teaching of Forestry . 



become, under the Normans, merely a game preserve, and our forest laws had 

 only this object in view. The royal forests were drawn upon for the supply 

 of timber to the navy ; but there was no systematic management, but little 

 regulation of felling, and probably no artificial planting till the writings of 

 John Evelyn, in the reign of Charles II., roused Englishmen to a sense of 

 the value of their timber trees. 



The Sussex iron-works in little more than a century almost cleared the 

 forests of the Weald ; a similar demand for charcoal caused great destruc- 

 tion in the forest of Dean ; the value of agricultural land, enhanced by the 

 Corn Laws, no doubt led to much clearing of woodlands ; and in many of 

 the remaining forest districts the unrestricted rights of pasturage, and of 

 topping and lopping prevented the proper growth of mature timber. 



The forests of other countries have had a similar history, and it is from 

 their experiences that I wish to demonstrate my first point, the national 

 importance of scientific forestry. 



Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Cyprus, once most fertile, are now 

 barren, whilst many of their harbours have become silted up, according to 

 the high authority of Sir Bichard Temple, mainly owing to disforesting. 

 Sir Richard also looks upon this as the main cause of the famines of India 

 and China. In Ceylon the removal of the forests exposing the ground to 

 the full force of tropical rainfall, is resulting in the lowering of the general 

 surface at the rate of a third of an inch per annum, thus removing the agri- 

 cultural soil. In Mauritius, once the sanatorium of India, the climate has 

 undoubtedly deteriorated as the air has become drier from the removal of 

 the forests : and the springs are drying up ; whilst, though gum-trees have 

 been recently introduced from Australia, much timber has to be imported 

 for building and firewood. Though possessing some of the finest species of 

 timber trees in the world, the gum trees, some parts of Australia are already, 

 from reckless felling, in want both of firewood and of timber for mining and 

 other purposes ; so that steps are now being taken towards forest conserva- 

 tion. In New Zealand, the most valuable timber tree, the Kauri pine, was 

 five years ago threatened with rapid extermination. The immense lum- 

 bering trade of Canada and the United States, and such wholesale waste as 

 felling thousands of fine hemlock-spruce for the sake of the bark alone, 

 which is used in tanning, the timber being left to rot on the ground, 

 threatens the very existence of their forests. At present rates of consump- 

 tion, without conservation, North America will apparently be denuded of 

 timber in less than a century, whilst the only eastern United States not 

 already so denuded, Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania, will seemingly be 

 so within the next fifteen years. Similarly, the wholesale felling of the 

 greenheart in Demerara, where saplings are actually used as rollers in trans- 

 porting the larger logs, and of the siphonia or caoutchouc in Brazil have 

 produced a falling off in the supply of these valuable trees. Humboldt 

 mentions that the water supply of Venezuela had decreased from the clearing 

 of some of the forests ; whilst some of the "West Indian islands, in spite of 

 a tropical rainfall, have been reduced to arid, sandy wastes. South Africa 

 has suffered much in climate from the destruction of forests, the rainfall 

 having become somewhat less and very irregular, months or years of 

 drought being followed by torrents which flow off the land without benefit- 

 ting it. The pine forests of Tunis have disappeared during the last 

 hundred years, and Colonel Playfair, our Consul-General for Algeria, speaks 

 thus of the resulting evils : " A hill-side deprived of the forest whose 

 foliage acted as a huge parasol to the ground, and whose roots served to 

 retain the vegetable soil which was formed by its decay, very soon loses the 



