16 FORESTRY IN SPAIN. 



midst of fields, and near to a forest where the practical 

 application of the fundamental studies might be possible 

 and easy ; and the knowledge that there did not exist in 

 the city a property with suitable buildings: this might 

 make the acceptance of the offer of that building 

 more easy for the founder than to take from the general 

 funds an amount, necessarily large, for the construction 

 and fitting up of premises destined for an establishment 

 which in truth owed its birth more to the personal energy 

 of one resolute person than to any spontaneous and 

 creative interest taken in it by individuals occupying a 

 prominent place in the administrative centres concerned/ 

 And he proceeds : 



4 We may here glance for a moment at the primary pre- 

 requisites of such an institution, and at the measure in 

 which the castle of Villaviciosa met these, as these had led to 

 the preference being first given to Madrid by Professor 

 Don Maximo Laguna in I860, and supported in his 

 remarkable memoir, Excurcion Forested por los Imperios 

 de Austria y liussia, he considering that from the par- 

 ticular character of the fields around Villaviciosa and, the 

 insignificant population there, with the absence of nil 

 scientific appliances beyond those pertaining to the 

 school itself, that place could not compete with Madrid 

 as a site for a school of forest engineers, the slight 

 advantage gained by facilities for practical instruction being- 

 eclipsed by the immensely greater facilities for scientific 

 instruction presented by the numerous museums and 

 libraries which eniich the capital of the kingdom. 



' More weighty however, and determining, in my opinion, 

 the ulterior decision, was the circumstance that within three 

 leagues and a-half from the city was a magnificent palace, 

 which could be had by the State at comparatively small 

 expense, and on which necessary works of repair and 

 adaptation could be executed at much less expense than 

 the rents yielded by it an immense benefit not easily to 

 be met with elsewhere. And there the school was esta- 

 blished in 1847, at least temporarily, as said Senor 



