36 THE NEW FORESTRY. 



slice of a German forest could be transferred to an English 

 park, it could not be distinguished from an ornamental English 

 plantation at a distance, but a close examination would show 

 that, unlike the other, it had been managed in a superior way, 

 and had a commercial as well as an ornamental value. 



Apart from these considerations, the number and extent of 

 the timber sales on private estates all over the country, show 

 that the commercial element does enter largely into the 

 wood management on estates. If there be any lack of interest 

 in this direction, it is due, as a rule, to the impression created 

 among proprietors, by past mismanagement, that things are 

 hopeless and cannot be altered. Reverse this impression and 

 a change will soon be noticeable. It is not long-deferred 

 returns from planting that influences proprietors so much as 

 the doubt of there ever being any returns at all. When the 

 larch was first introduced, and its value as a timber tree was 

 realised, almost all owners of estates planted it extensively, 

 even small freeholders, just as the Dutch are planting 

 Scotch fir now on their allotments, although it was seldom 

 expected that the crop would be realised by the planter. The 

 same may happen again. Numbers of good examples of 

 planting for the distant future might be cited — the Duke of 

 Athol, for example, in Scotland, and the Earls of Yarborough, 

 in Yorkshire — the latter having planted during the last 

 hundred years some twenty millions of trees, according to an 

 authorised statement in the "Field" of December 3rd, 1898. 

 Such pleas will not, we think, interfere with good forestry, 

 and those who are under the delusion that the introduction of 

 the German forestry system into this country will banish 

 beauty and sentiment from the land, must be wofully ignorant 

 of German forests and that German forest lore and romance 

 that has tinged so much of the literature of the world. There 

 is one direction, however, in which German sentiment does not 

 run, and that is in extravagant veneration for very old and 

 useless dead trees such as encumber so many woods and parks 

 in Britain. They believe in live trees and plenty of them. 

 They do not excel in collections of relics like the Old Cale- 

 donian Forest for example, or like Sherwood, nor do they pride 

 themselves on parks of stag-headed oaks or other species, 

 except on a reasonable scale. Their rotation periods have 

 long since put an end to all that, and they point with pride 

 instead to the grand tracts of forest that clothe their mountains 

 and waste lands almost everywhere, and which have become 

 of so much importance to their country. 



