INTEODUCTIOy. 17 



and the injury resulting from unrestricted grazing have given an 

 ever widening field to landslips and avalanches, to torrents and 

 inundations. At the present daj' scarcely one-eleventh of the ori- 

 ginal area, about 1,255,000 acres, of which a large proportion con- 

 sists of bare rock, remains under the conservation of the State. It 

 is nearly all communal woods given up to grazing. These woods 

 present themselves in broken, seedy looking patches or strips, the 

 remains of former primeval forest. In spite of this ruined state 

 they are still a priceless possession. They afford the inhabitants 

 both fuel and shelter, and considered as materials to use in restoi- 

 ing the forest, they offer the most sure means of preserving and 

 rehabilitating those districts. For there Indeed the forests, the 

 soil and the Inhabitants must prosper or perish together. The popu- 

 lation of the Higher and Lower Alps has doubled itself within the 

 last century, and yet is only in the proportion of 50 souls to a 

 square mile. The restriction of grazing in the Alps, a measure of 

 the highest necessity, would entail on the inhabitants but very 

 small sacrifices, for the greater portion of the land there commands 

 a rent of only about 8 pence an acre. The private forests borne 

 in the district cadastral lists as containing some hundreds of thou- 

 sands of acres scarcely deserve the name of forest, and are generally 

 worth extremely little. To such a point does this go that these 

 so-called forests have occasionally been given up by the owners, 

 more anxious to avoid the reality of paying a tax than to maintain 

 and keep up the delusive idea of an imaginary income. 



The mountains of Central France are still more denuded of wood 

 than the Alps ; but happily the soil there is not liable to erosion, 

 and the climate is moist. The remains of all the old forests and 

 some recent rebolsements, concentrated for the most part in the 

 Puy-de-D6me, do not occupy even the eighth part of the area of the 

 entire region. The forests under state management aggregate only 

 187,500 acres. In the last century Auvergne still sent its silver fir 

 to Paris ; at the present day not a vestige of this tree remains in the 

 province. And yet there are in this region hundreds of thousands of 

 acres of which no use whatsoever is made, and extensive tablelands 

 from which the most laborious people in France can only eke out a 

 miserable existence. The cultivation of the sweet chestnut, (a cul- 

 ture that yields but small profits, and a fruit that affords but little 

 sustenance,) is one of the universal characteristics of the region ; but 



