102 THE FOREST LANDS OF FINLAND. 
France, Spain, Italy, Austria, and Hungary, there are 
being carried on extensive sylvicultural operations 
designed to counteract evils which have been found 
to follow the destruction of forests which has already 
occurred. 
Of the epitome of this, which we have in the present 
position of the practice of Svedjande in Finland, I avail 
myself to bring under consideration the general subject 
of the extent to which the destruction of extensive dense 
forests may be expedient in the interests of the inhabit- 
ants of the lands in which they exist. 
It-has been made subject of complaint, and it may be 
the case, that wherever man has gone to settle and replenish 
the earth he has found it a wilderness, a dense jungle of 
forests, and he has made it a desert, going forth then to 
seek fresh fields and pastures new, again to repeat the 
work of destruction. I repeat it may be so; but, on the 
other hand, it is the case that we have no indication that 
it is the will of the Creator of these forests that the earth 
should be anywhere continuously and always covered with 
forests. It is a popular doctrine that on an exposed rock 
there alights perchance the spore of some lichen, which, 
finding there conditions favourable to its germination, 
forthwith grows, and reproduces spores, and dies; that in 
process of time there alights on its decayed remains the 
spore of a moss or fern, or other cryptogam, which finds 
now what it would not have found before, and which others 
of its kind alighting there aforetime found not, a soil 
appropriate to its growth; and forthwith it germinates 
and grows. And again, long after this, there alights on 
the decayed remains of these cryptogams the seed of 
some flowering grass, or herb, or tree—the follower, it may 
be, of many which had fallen there and had been blown 
away, or had been washed away, or had perished; but 
this finding now what these could not find erstwhile, 
conditions favourable to its vegetation, it germinates, and 
begins a new departure in the clothing of the rock with 
