70 SYLVICULTURE IN LA SOLOGNB. 



They were once covered with a forest 1,200,000 aores in extent, 

 but this having been cleared away, they have relapsed into what 

 was their earlier condition, a barren sand waste, diversified by marsh 

 land, and marshes in abundance. 



In writing of the " Desert World," M. Mangin, or his translator 

 into English, introducing his subject, says, "To those whose 

 imaginations have been kindled by glowing pictures of the African 

 Sahara and the Arabian wilderness, it will be, perhaps, a matter of 

 surprise to learn that even fertile and civilised Europe includes 

 within her boundaries regions which are scarcely less cheerless or 

 desolate, though happily of far inferior extent. 



" In France, so richly cultivated, so laborious, and so blessed by 

 genial Nature as she is, there are, nevertheless, a few districts where 

 her sons may wholly forget — nay, almost disbelieve in the existence 

 of — her cities stirring with ' the hum of men,' her vineyards and her 

 gardens, her grassy pastures, her prolific meadows, her well ordered 

 highways, and those ' iron roads ' which are the incessant channels of 

 such restless energy, movement, and vigorous life." 



And after describing mountain solitudes in the gigantic ranges of 

 the Jura, the Vosges, and the Cevennes ; the first an outlying spur 

 of the great Alpine system, and situated on the border of Switzerland ; 

 the. second separating the valley of the Ehine from that of the 

 Moselle ; the last separating the valley of the Loire from that of the 

 basin of the Rhone, he goes on to reckon among the uncultivated 

 regions of France, the marshes of the Bresse of Forez, and, with others, 

 those of the Sologne. 



The Landes or heaths of the Sologne appear as a desert surrounded 

 by a magnificent girdle of cultivated land, fully developed in the 

 fertile valleys of the Loire and the Cher. And, as is the case in 

 Gascony, the heath is surrounded on all sides by valleys, vineyards, 

 and gardens, in the highest state of cultivation. While in Corsica, 

 another sandy desert, the orange, the olive, and the chesnut adorn 

 spots surrounded with maquis, veritable heaths, with this, as the only 

 difference between them and the heaths of the Sologne, that under 

 that southern climate the whins and the meagre heaths are replaced 

 by the arbutus, the myrtle, arborescent heaths, cistuses, and 

 lentisques. 



In all of the places mentioned, in Sologne, in Brenne, and in 

 Gascony, it is not rare to see farms of from 1,500 to 2,000 hectares, 

 in round numbers, 4,000 and 5,000 acres, with only from 150 to 200 



