144 INITIATIVE IN EVOLUTION 



by a man's voice sold for a few francs. Crops replaced the scanty 

 herbage of the salt marsh, and a familiar characteristic of the 

 landscape, the shepherd on stilts, was seen no more. Six hundred 

 thousand hectares of Landes planted with sea pines produced resin 

 to the annual value of fifteen million francs, and through these 

 trees also was achieved a climatic revolution, and it is this district 

 which is now a department of a great and well-ordered State. 1 



1 From Arthur Young's Travels in France during the years 1788, 1789, 

 with introduction by M. Betham Edwards, 



