AMERICAN FORESTRY 







further one gels towards Belgium the more clayey and richer the soil. 

 \ixlarhapelle. about fifteen miles west of Cologne, is a fine stand 

 of mature pure beech, then a small stand of spruce, and finally oak, all 

 doing well on a clayey sand soil, the spruce being planted. A short distance 

 further on one passes a big planted spruce forest of 25-year trees abutting 

 for half a mile on the railroad with ten and twenty-foot fire lanes perpen- 

 ( | i( . u ] ;ir ,o i he track every three-hundred feet. A bare open strip one hundred 

 f,,., wide, protected this forest from the locomotive fires. Speaking of fire 

 protection, I would like to note here that though this was near the end of 

 on,- .-f the most severe drouths Germany has known, no rain having fallen for 



r nine \\.-.-ks, I did not see a single forest fire except one down in the 



Bohemian Swii/erland, beyond the Saxon border, where a big one was rolling 



..f smoke up over the mountains near Tetschen-Bodenbach. But in all 



rmany, though one could see for twenty miles each side of the track, not 

 a forest I'm- was in evidence. There was plenty of grass burns in the pro- 



i\r strips, but the lanes and trenches seemed to have automatically stopped 

 thnii from getting into the forests. 



IN BELGIUM 



.lu-t outside of Aix-la-Chapelle there are large spruce and oak forests, 

 and shortly beyond you cross the border at Veviers into Belgium and prac- 

 tical foi-.--iry ends as suddenly as if one were transported to America. The 



ial wild neglected forest, so familiar along the right of way at home began 

 to appear. Trees of all sizes and shapes and species rambled along together, 

 mostly crooked and worthless commercially, and giving no sort of yield 



,i. uliiirally. About fifteen thousand feet to the acre would be about the 

 \alue of the cutting, whereas the German forests I had just passed would 

 run nearer sixty thousand, and ninety thousand is not at all uncommon. 



hiiiing the whole of se\eii hundred miles of travel in Germany, never 



did I -ingle tract of woodland neglected or one that was allowed to 



ithoiii yielding up a revenue up to the full bearing power of the soil. 



I -aw hundreds of examples of German forestry, with practically all the 



-ruled except maritime pine; the kiefer of the great sandy plains 



of I'm ia, the spruce and fir of Saxony, and the hardwoods of the Rhine, 



but ne\. ! .1 -ingle acre of wasted forest land. And the fact that much of 



it wa- on the railroad, with each its siding for swift and cheap transportation 



ke well for a ipiick and profitable market, with but little expense inter- 

 \nnnu' between the ripe tree and the lumber mill. It was easy to realize 

 bow < in-many, with a total forest area of only thirty-five million acres, gets 

 an annual \ i.-ld of four-and-a-half billion board feet, and no less remarkable, 



my mind, is the adaption of house building practice and of the industries 



of i in many to the needs .f its forestry so that nothing is wasted. It would 



ec>m that, in the course of centuries of tree crops, the foresters and the 



- had gotten together in agree on the best way to use all the wood 



that i- grown on the soil. 



