322 



THE FORESTS OF UPPER INDIA 



British legisla- 

 tion destructive 

 to forests. 



Loss of carbon 

 in England. 



Warnings 

 given by forest 

 experts. 



expense of the Itidian Government that a soHtary forest school 

 has been estabHshed in England.* ' But land legislation in 

 Ireland and succession laws have been recently framed so as to 

 protect the few private forests in the country ?' No, not at all ; 

 rather to place a premium on their destruction. All other 

 countries in Europe have taken the forests under Government 

 management. Germany and France have many forest schools. 

 England alone has done nothing. Immense wealth may be 

 extracted from coal-mines and gold-mines, but when they are 

 exhausted they have no recuperative power, and the mining 

 population must perish out of the country. But forests, if 

 planted, will always be growing and extracting carbon from the 

 air for future use, which carbon is essential to man. Millions of 

 tons of it are being dissipated and wasted in the form of carbonic 

 oxide from coal consumption, at a pace which must bring it to an 

 end in England within a measurable distance of time. 



In this matter, as well as in trade, Germany and other countries 

 are steadily taking up the advantages for the future which the 

 British throw away. In Dr. Schlich's ' Manual of Forestry ' there 

 is a table (p. 54) which shows that the percentage of forest in 

 Germany is o'26 of the whole land, while the British Isles have 

 only o"4 per cent. Russia has 0*42, Sweden 0-35, France o'i6, 

 Norway 025. These enormous forest areas are drawing from the 

 air the carbon which is being lost to England by coal combustion, 

 lost irretrievably to us. Enormous areas in England and Ireland 

 are lying practically waste, which might grow the finest of timber 

 and recover a share of the lost carbon. 



The journal of the Society of Arts in London records no less 

 than seven most interesting and authoritative papers on Forestry 

 in recent years,t each of them describing the fatal progress of 

 forest destruction wrought by the Anglo-Saxon race in the last 

 thirty years, and strongly urging on our Government to follow the 

 example of other nations before it is too late. At the meeting of 

 the British Association at Oxford in 1894 Professor Bayley 



* At Cooper's Hill. There is also a lecturer at Edinburgh. 



f ' Papers on Forestry,' by Colonel Wragge, December, 1871 ; by Sir R. 

 Temple, January, 1881 ; by Colonel Pearson, March, 1882; by P. L. Simmonds, 

 February, 1885; by Dr. Schlich, February, 1890 ; by General Michael, 

 December, 1894 ; by D. E. Hutchins, November, 1899 ; and Dr. Schlich, 1901 . 



