340 Norway, and the Norwegiaiis 



the west, from Lindisnses, in the extreme south, as far 

 as the Throndhjem Fjord. Over this district the propor- 

 tion of common properties rose as high as 30 per cent. 



Those again of the forests of Norway which were 

 not crown land were originally common land. And 

 when the rights iu them came to be distributed they 

 were often settled in a very curious and complicated 

 way. Over the same area one man might possess the 

 right of pasturing his cattle beneath the trees ; another, 

 of stripping off the birch bark, which in old days had 

 so many more uses than it has to-day, being used, for 

 example, to make leaves to write upon, and sometimes 

 being used for clothing ; then a third might have the 

 right of felling these birch-trees, but these trees only ; 

 a fourth might have the right of cutting conifers — the 

 firs, and pines. The legislature has tried hard to remedy 

 the inconveniences caused by the stripping up of the 

 land into fragments, and by the complication of com- 

 mon rights. 



The great land hunger which exists in Norway, and 

 is quite as strong there as it is in Ireland, will have 

 been already suggested by the facts which we have 

 detailed. During the whole of this century the propor- 

 tion of proprietors to tenants of the laud has been con- 

 stantly on the increase. Tlius in 1825 the proprietors 

 constituted 66 per cent, of the cultivators of the soil, and 

 in the succeeding five decades they increased succes- 

 sively to form a proportion of 70, 76, 81, and 85 per cent. 



Equally marked has been the absolute increase in 

 the number of the peasant proprietors. Thus, in the 

 thirty years between 1840 and 1870, the number of 

 landed proprietors in the country grew from 109,154 



