32 Government Forestry Alrotxl. [210 



success and the sharpness of the moral which it 

 serves to point have rightly made this branch of for- 

 estry in France a favorite subject for writers and 

 speakers on forest reform. There is, then, the less 

 need to do more than add that of the total cost to the 

 French government, some 50,000,000 of francs, about 

 one-half was consumed in engineering works whose 

 direct object was to make the replanting of the drain- 

 age areas of torrents possible. -'The forest thus re- 

 stored to its natural place is alone able." says M. 

 Demontzey, the eminent French authority, "to main- 

 tain the good, but precarious, results of the works of 

 correction in the water-ways themselves.'' The dis- 

 appearance of this forest in the first place may be 

 traced in most cases directly to mountain pasturage, 

 and the whole story of reboisement in France is full 

 of the deepest interest in comparison with the present 

 state and probable future of our mountain forests. 

 The planting of the dunes and the Landes, the first 

 of which especially was an achievement of which any 

 nation might well be proud, remain to be mentioned, 

 but the information available to the writer at the 

 moment is neither recent nor complete, and these 

 matters must be left untouched in the present paper. 



SWITZERLAND. 



I pass now to Switzerland, a country where the 

 development as well as the actual condition of for- 

 est policy may well claim our attention. The history 

 of forestry in the Swiss republic is of peculiar inter- 

 est to the people of the United States, because in its 

 beginnings may be traced many of the charateristics 

 of the situation here and now, and because the Swiss, 



