74 FORESTRY IN GERMANY. 



How entire districts which flourished in the past have been reduced to poverty 

 and want through forest destruction, has been seen in Prussia, where large 

 tracts of lands have suffered under sufch calamities. 



" By stripping the beaches of their forests in the seventeenth and eight- 

 eenth centuries, the §ea-coasts have become exposed to all winds and storms. 

 Fields, once fertile, have beeri transformed into waste sand dunes, and whole 

 villages, whose agricultural people formerly prospered, have ceased to exist. 



"In the middle and eastern provinces light and undulating soil has been 

 replaced by small or large sand hills, and places where forests once stood and 

 served to carry off stagnant moisture, have been turned into marshes. In the 

 western mountainous provinces the fertile forest soil, the waste product of 

 thousands of years of the trees, has disappeared. It has been dried up by 

 the sun and wind, and washed into the valleys by rain and snow-water, and 

 left the mountains bare and unfertile, whose soil is scarcely capable of sup- 

 porting any vegetation save heath and broom-grass. 



"The rich meadows in the valleys have. vanished, they have been again 

 and again, after every rain storm, washed and torn by the water rushing from 

 the mountain tops. The high moors which have been formed by the destruc- 

 tion of the forest, emit at all times of the year vapors and fogs which kill 

 vegetation far into the land. Thus the soil becomes directly impoverished, 

 and the climatic conditions change and become worse. Instances of the in- 

 jurious effect upon the culture of the soil caused by the destruction of the 

 forests can be seen to a smaller or larger extent throughout Prussia." 



RECLAMATION OF SAND DUNES AND WASTE PLACES. 



The state spends annually considerable sums in restoring waste places in 

 tbe interior, and more especially the sand dunes on the sea coast by planting 

 the former in pine-trees and the latter in grass, thereby protecting the coast 

 belt against the violence of storms and facilitating forest cultivation in the 

 interior. 



SOURCES OF LUMBER SUPPLY, TRADE, IMPORT DUTIES, ETC. 



By far the greater part of all the lumber used in Rhenish-Prussia and 

 Westphalia, Hessen-Nassau, &c., comes from the Bavarian and Black forests. 



Trade has been rather brisk during the last year, and large quantities of 

 lumber have been used, but prices were, and are yet, low and profits small. 



Considerable quantities of white wood (pine) are annually imported from 

 Sweden and Russia in the form of battens, i. e. cut into logs of 2 to 3 inches 

 thick, S to 7 inches wide, and 6 to 24 feet long, English measurement. 

 These battens are used only for planing boards. The import duty on battens 

 is I mark (say 23.8 cents) per 100 kilograms, or about 25 marks (say ^5.95) 

 per standard of r25 cubic feet. I am informed that these battens must be 

 imported, because South Germany cannot supply the necessary quantity of 

 the desired lengths and dimensions. American wood is also pretty largely 

 imported, and the demand for it is increasing annually. 



The annexed table of the importation of lumber into Germany shows the 

 amount imported from the United States during the last three years. 



