280 A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 



culture shifted from the Mediterranean region to central and western 

 Europe. The Mediterranean lands were poorly forested, but central 

 and western Europe during that period was typically a forested region. 

 The forests played an important part in the economic life of the 

 people of the Middle Ages, not only as a source of fuel and raw ma- 

 terials, but also as an inimical environment which they had to over- 

 come in their struggle to make room for cultivation and pasturage. 

 By the end of the fourteenth century, man had conquered the 

 forests. By the fifteenth century, the conquest had gone so far that 

 in some parts of Germany, and elsewhere, there began to be com- 

 plaints of the exhaustion of forests and demands that excessive clear- 

 ing be stopped. 



Between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries wood ceased to 

 be purely a local commodity in Europe, and timber began to be an 

 article of international trade, transported in rafts along the rivers. 

 Along with the development of the timber trade, there grew up the 

 sawmill industry. The first sawmills operated by water power 

 appeared in France in the thirteenth century, although whipsawing 

 by hand remained the prevailing method of sawing lumber for several 

 centuries. Wcl was the dominant material for ordinary house con- 

 struction during the period between the thirteenth and the seven- 

 teenth centuries. 



As the cities increased in number and grew in size, the consumption 

 of wood, the only source of fuel of that time, became very great. 

 Supplying such cities as Paris, Vienna, and London with firewood 

 became a vast enterprise. The Thames, even as late as the eighteenth 

 century, served as a main channel for supplying London with firewood. 

 Beginning as early as the fourteenth century, first in Germany and 

 later in Sweden and England, there was a notable growth of the 

 metallurgical industry, which required great quantities of charcoal 

 and firewood. The glass and pottery industries also came to the 

 front. The growth of these industries, located largely in the forests, 

 together with the growing consumption by the cities, brought on a 

 shortage of fuel wood. In the eighteenth century there arose through- 

 out western Europe an acute fuel crisis. The shortage of wood led 

 even to the curtailment of the metallurgical industry. Laws were 

 passed, for instance, prohibiting construction of metallurgical plants 

 nearer than 22 miles from London. In cities where there was a 

 shortage of fuel wood for bakeries there arose a demand in the name 

 of humanity to close the metallurgical plants, because it was reasoned 

 that it was better to leave people without iron than without bread. 

 The shortage of firewood was occasioned by the exhaustion of the 

 nearby forests or those within hauling distance of the rivers-. Large 

 supplies of timber remained, but owing to the difficulty of transporta- 

 tion these were as good as nonexistent. 



Meanwhile, the demand for timber for many other purposes had 

 been growing by leaps and bounds. A very important use was for 

 ship construction. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth cen- 

 turies was a period of rapid growth of the navies and merchant 

 marine of Spain, France, Holland, England, and other countries. In 

 1577 England had only 135 merchant vessels above 100 tons capacity. 

 In 1701 her merchant marine comprised 3,281 vessels, with a total 

 capacity of 261,222 tons, and in 1788 she had 9,360 vessels, with a 

 capacity of more than a million tons. 



