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- v ' 



formerly been prepared for cultivation by buniing - - a method of 

 clearing ground for fields formerly much used in Finland l ) which 

 naturally presupposes their former covering of forest. Similarly, the 

 greater part of the cultivated marsh-lands are on the sites of former 

 forests. According to investigations in the Administrative Districts 

 of Kuopio, Mikkeli (St. Michel) and Viipuri (Viborg), about 80 

 of the land now cultivated has earlier been forest and about 20 % 

 marsh land, of which only about 13 % has been forestless. The richer 

 a neighbourhood has been in arable land, the more quickly and thickly 

 has it become populated, the areas of growing forest diminishing 

 accordingly. 



What has been said in the foregoing regarding cultivated land 

 applies chiefly also to the so-called natural pasture-lands, which 

 according to an estimate made of them take up close on 1 million 

 hectares. These have also earlier been the best-growing forest land 

 of their respective districts, and even now it is not at all unusual 

 to find quite a goodly number of trees on them. 



Still closer to the forests proper are the haka pasturages, which 

 for this reason have also been included in the aforementioned 20.5 

 million hectares of growing forest. Their extent was adjudged in the 

 statistics collected by the Board of Agriculture in 1920, to be about 

 0.63 million hectares. If the term haka pasturage be widened to 

 include other than smaller cattle-pasturages enclosed within fences, 

 as was done in the said statistics, e. g., all forest areas where the forest 

 itself has acquired the nature of haka forest on account of cattle 

 being allowed to graze there, this area will be considerably increa- 

 sed, perhaps to about 2 million hectares, or nearly 10 % of the whole 

 area of forests. In the earlier-mentioned Administrative Districts 

 of Kuopio, Mikkeli (St. Michel) and Viipuri (Viborg), forests of this 

 description formed, according to certain investigations, about 31 % 

 of the total forests. In other districts where clearing by burning has 

 not been so common lately, the proportion of haka forests is 

 smaller. 



Naturally forestless areas are for the most part rocky ground 

 and naked rock, above all the parts of Lapland north of the fore 4 st- 

 line. and even further south, the mountainous ridges and the naked 

 roofs of solitary fells. On the former, the thriving of any forest is 

 impossible on account of the nature of the ground, on the latter, at- 



x ) The method in question is as follows: During the summer previous to 

 the burning, the forest is cut down, the trees being left on the site. In the 

 burning, the undergrowth and the branches and tops of the trees disappear, 

 the larger trunks are conveyed elsewhere and the land is then ready for cul- 

 tivation. Alter the lapse of a few years, forest is allowed to grow again on 

 the clearing. 



