202 France. 
present only 125,000 acres remain in the hands of the 
state. The returns from the sales, however, reimbursed 
the cost of the reboisement in excess by $120,000, so that 
the state really acquired for nothing, a property, now es- 
timated to be worth $10,000,000. 
To the eastward of this region of dunes stretch the 
so-called Landes, a territory triangular in shape, con- 
taining 2,000,000 acres of shifting sands and marshes, on 
which a poor population of shepherds (on stilts) used 
to eke out a living. In 1837 an engineer of the admin- 
istration of bridges and roads (administration des ponts 
et chaussés), conceived the idea of improving this sec- 
tion by reforestation, and at his own expense recovered 
some 1,200 acres in the worst marsh by ditching and 
planting. The success of this plantation invited imita- 
tors and by 1835 the reforested area had grown to 50,000 
acres. This led in 1857 to the passage of a law ordering 
forestation of the parts of the land owned by the com- 
munities, the state at the same time undertaking the 
expense of building a system of roads and making the 
plans for forestation free of charge. The communities 
were allowed to sell a part of the reclaimed land in order 
to recover the expense. From 1850 to 1892, private 
owners imitating the government and communal work, 
1,750,000 acres were covered with pine forests at a cost 
of $4.00 to $5.00 per acre, or, including the building of 
roads, a total of around $10,000,000 had been expended. 
In 1877 the value of the then recovered area was esti- 
mated at over $40,000,000, this figure being arrived at 
by calculating the possible net revenues of a pinery under 
a %5 years rotation, which was figured at $2.50 per 
acre with a production of 51 cubic feet per acre, and 200 
