AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRIES. 217 



on the boundaries of the larger cities, where great use is made of 

 the cane. 



The contrast between our glades with their many varieties of 

 flowers, and the well kept but monotonous sward of our gardens 

 and public grounds, is much the same as that between the Japanese 

 natural mountain forest,^ with its variegated growths of many kinds, 

 and the regularly formed pine or deciduous forests, which it has been 

 found necessary to cultivate. Here in the mountain forest as in the 

 Hara, nature, so rich in Japan in variety and shape, has preserved 

 its original physiognomy. But richness of variety does not by any 

 means betoken an abundance of valuable timber in such a forest 

 any more than of fodder in the wild meadow-land, and an Eldorado 

 to the lovers of nature and of plants is not always such when 

 viewed from the point of national economy. 



In the wild and neglected forest — whether primeval or run wild 

 is of no importance — life and death, sprouting and withering vege- 

 tation are mixed together in a wonderful way. H. Cotta ^ says in 

 reference to this, that forests grow and flourish best in places where 

 men do not live, and consequently where no forestry is carried on. 

 It is a wide-spread but none the less erroneous view that the prim- 

 eval forest is particularly rich in wood. It includes giant trees 

 interspersed with every grade of the most diverse wood-growths, 

 down to the lowest bush, but produces by no means the total 

 amount of timber yielded by a highly cultivated forest covering 

 the same surface, where valueless kinds of wood are kept back 

 in order to better provide the light and air necessary to a finely 

 developed growth. And so the forester reduces the number of 

 species in a natural forest by the axe and other means, just as the 

 continued manuring and cultivation of a meadow works an im- 

 poverishment of its Flora. With the numerous motley grasses and 

 weeds the equipoise is disturbed, and an unequal development 

 caused in which the weakest surrenders. 



As is more carefully noted in vol. i. p. 146, Asa-ki, the deciduous 

 forest of Japan, in contrast to Kuro-ki, or the dark pine forests, and 

 to our own woods with their few species, is made up of a great mix- 

 ture of large numbers of trees and bushes in all stages of growth. 

 It is exceptional and generally due to special cultivation when we 

 find chestnuts and the varieties of oak forming separate plantations. 

 Creepers and climbing plants, parasitic and rooted ferns are seen 

 in greater variety and larger growth than with us. " To name all 

 the constituents and inhabitants of a Japanese forest of deciduous 

 growth would be to catalogue not less than half the Flora of the 

 country. In the higher mountains and more to the north are only 

 a {^yN evergreen bushes, and no trees, conifers of course excepted. 

 The most common constituents of these forests are oaks, beeches, 

 hornbeams, maples, birch, horse chestnuts, magnolias, aralias, wal- 



^ Yama, or mountain, is the commonest term for a natural forest. 

 2 Preface to his " Anweisung zum Waldbau." 



