116 Germany. 
laws it is punished by a money fine more or less in pro- 
portion to the value of the stolen material or the damage 
suffered. This money fine may be transmuted into 
imprisonment or forest labor, but corporal punishment, 
which still prevailed in the first decades of the century, 
has been abolished. Wood stealing was very general and 
rampant during the beginning of the century, but im- 
provement in the condition of the country population 
and in the number and personnel of the forest officers 
since 1850 has now reduced it to a minimum. 
Formerly, and until 1848, the administrators and even 
the forest owners acted at the same time as prose- 
cutor, judge and executioner, and only in 1879 was this 
condition everywhere and entirely changed and infrac- 
tions against forest laws adjudged by regular courts of 
law, holding meetings at stated times for the prosecu- 
tion of such infractions. 
Nevertheless the court procedures in forest matters 
still vary from the usual court practice, providing a 
simpler, cheaper and more ready disposal of testi- 
mony and witnesses, and quicker retribution, which ig 
largely rendered possible through having every forest 
officer under oath as a sheriff, and his statement and per- 
haps the confiscated tools employed in the theft, being 
accepted as prima facie evidence of the infraction. 
The social position of the underforesters and the for- 
est protective service has also been improved until all 
charges of incompetency and immorality which were 
not undeserved even until past the middle of the 
nineteenth century, have become reversed; the forest 
service being morally on as high a plane as all the de- 
partments of German administrations. 
