A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



" Z(? the solid ground 

 Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye." — Wordsworth. 



THURSDAY, NOVEMBER i, 1900. 



A NEW FRENCH FORESTRY TEXT-BOOK. 

 Les Forits. Par L. Boppe, Directeur honoraire de TEcole 

 Nationale des Eaux et Forets de Nancy, et Ant. 

 Jolyet, charge de cours k TEcole. Pp. xi. + 488. 

 (Paris : J. B. Baillere et Fils, 1901). 



WITHIN the last ten years the course of instruction 

 at Nancy has been considerably modified. The 

 school is attended by some foreign students, who, as well 

 as a few occasional private French students, are admitted 

 without any regular examination. Formerly, students 

 intended for service in the State and Communal forests 

 of France passed a preliminary competitive examination 

 in the subjects usually taught at a Lyc^e, including 

 physics and chemistry. A knowledge of botany, ento- 

 mology and geology, however, was not required of them, 

 these subjects being taught ab initio at Nancy ; in 

 those days the marks obtained for forestry unduly 

 overshadowed those given for natural history, and only a 

 few devoted naturalists were to be found among French 

 forest officers. Forestry teaching at Nancy also was 

 much too dogmatic, and not sufficiently based on experi- 

 mental results. 



At present, French forest students who are intended 

 for the service of the State come from the Institiit 

 National agronomique^ and must obtain a diploma there 

 before being admitted to Nancy. About eighty students 

 enter the Institut agronomique annually, while the number 

 of State students at Nancy is limited to twelve per annum, 

 the last twelve men admitted to Nancy standing i, 3, 6, 7, 

 9, 10, 15, 21, 24, 26, 39 and 48 at the final examination of 

 the Institut agronomique. Nancy students thus at pre- 

 sent possess a considerable knowledge of agriculture and 

 experimental natural science ; they also get pecuniary 

 allowances from the State, so that admission to the 

 French forest service is open to a wide field of French 

 citizens, and is not confined, as are some of our own 

 public departments, to a restricted class of men, who 

 have sufficient means to pay the high cost of training 

 involved, this restriction injuriously affecting the intel- 

 lectual standard of the departments. 



Na 1 6 18, VOL. 63] 



Forestry teaching at Nancy has responded admirably 

 to the higher attainments of the present class of students, 

 and it is a real pleasure for one who studied there nearly 

 thirty years ago to note the excellence of this new text- 

 book of sylviculture. 



In it a forest is described as a complex organic whole, 

 composed of a porous and friable humous soil, covered 

 with dead leaves and moss, wherever the shade is too 

 great for vegetation other than saprophytes ; where, 

 however, the mature crop of trees has been thinned or 

 cleared with a view to natural regeneration, the soil is 

 soon overgrown with grasses or other herbaceous plants, 

 as well as brambles, bushes and shrubs, which, together 

 with the young plants of the valuable forest species, form 

 a complex mass from which saplings, poles and trees 

 gradually emerge, and compose a new crop, either as 

 coppice or high forest. This evolution of a new crop 

 from an old one requires considerable skill on the part 

 of a forester, and it is only by carefully observing and 

 following nature that success is obtained. Each forest 

 species makes different demands on soil and climate and 

 requires in its young state various degrees of protection 

 against hostile meteoric influences, injurious plants and 

 animals. 



In France natural regeneration, either by seed or by 

 coppice shoots, is the chief means of reproducing a forest, 

 and human interference with the growing forces of nature 

 is reduced to a minimum. The chief classes of French 

 indigenous high forests, reproduced by seed, consist of 

 oak, beech or silver-fir ; maritime pine in Gascony ; 

 larch and spruce in the Alps, the latter also growing in 

 the Jura with beech and silver fir ; Pinus sylvestris (for 

 which our name of Scotch pine is far too local, and as a 

 substitute for which I would suggest the name red pine) 

 is indigenous in France only in mountainous regions, but 

 has been extensively planted on poor sandy soils in the 

 lowlands. There are extensive coppices of mixed under- 

 wood with oak and other standards, and of holm Oak 

 with Aleppo pine standards, in Provence. The holm oak 

 {Quercus Ilex) prefers calcareous soils, and is replaced in 

 the south of France, on siliceous soils, by the two very 

 valuable cork oaks {Quercus Suber and Q. occidentalis\ 

 the latter differing from the former by its habitat near the 

 Bay bf Biscay, and by its taking two years to mature its 



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