30 Transactions.— Miscellaneous. 
from periodical thinnings was estimated at £35,000 annually, until the end 
of the twenty-first year, when the colony would be in possession of 300 
square miles of forest. 
These estimates may possibly be a little overdrawn, but the scheme 
appears well worthy of consideration, and it is to be borne in mind that in 
no case is natural forest or “bush ” so valuable, commercially speaking, as 
planted forest, and no one can deny the fact that tree-planting, on an 
extensive scale, would be a very necessary proceeding in all the Australasian 
colonies wherever the natural forests have been largely destroyed, to say 
nothing of the undoubted beneficial influence it would exert upon the 
climate and rainfall. 
Humboldt thought that dense woods gave out what he called a * frigorie," 
or cooling radiation, which condensed the vaporous clouds, so that there 
should naturally be frequent and abundant rains in their vicinity; and, on 
the other hand, he thought that the warm radiations which take place from 
level, sandy, and treeless plains, would produce little if any rainfall, and all 
our experience tends to show that these views are correet. 
The foregoing examples have been selected from a mass of facts illus- 
trative of the dependence, to a large extent, of the rainfall of a country upon 
the preservation or renewal of its forests, whether on mountain-ranges or 
on table-lands, or on less elevated tracts of country. And although the 
meteorological action of forests is but imperfectly understood at present, 
yet the data hitherto collected are quite sufficient to point to the conclusion 
that trees, being natural conductors of electricity, as has been proved by the 
experiments of M. Grandeau, Professor of the ** Ecole Forestriére,” in France, 
serve as intermediaries for the exchange of the electricities with which the 
earth and the atmosphere are respectively charged. 
It has also been said that the earthquakes which are common in Spain 
and Portugal, would be less frequent and less violent if the elevated regions 
of those countries were clothed with forests, so as to secure regular and 
harmless conduction of the electric fluid from the aerial to the terrestrial 
reservoir, and vice versa. However this may be, one thing is very certain, 
which is that hailstorms, which are believed to be produced by a certain 
specific electric action, become more frequent and destructive in districts 
which possess no forests ; and on this point Signor Calvi, in his ** Hints on 
the Importance and Cultivation of Forests," states that:—‘‘ When the chains 
of the Alps and the Apennines had not yet been stripped of their magnificent 
erown of woods, the May hail, which now desolates the fertile plains of 
Lombardy, was much less frequent; but, since the prostration of the forest, 
these tempests are laying waste even the mountain soils, whose older 
inhabitants scarcely knew the plague." 
