208 France. 
coppice and of coppice with standards characterize the 
holdings of the municipal and private owners and the 
selection forest still plays a considerable part even in the 
State forests; the method of shelterwood in compart- 
ments, being still more under discussion than practice. 
When the inefficiency of the methode a tire-aire was 
recognized the only remedy appeared to lie in a clearing 
system with artificial reforestation which was, however, 
only begun in the 19th century. Yet the success of the 
plantings in waste lands does not seem to have brought 
about much extension of this method to the felling areas. 
As late as 1862, Clavé, complaining of the conditions of 
silviculture in France, and of the ignorance regarding 
it, refers to the clearing system as méthode allemande, 
the German method. The shelterwood system, la méth- 
ode du reensemencement, which was introduced in 
theory from Germany by Lorentz in 1827, was hardly 
applied until the middle of the century. Indeed, the 
promulgation of this superior method cost Lorentz his 
position in 1839, and other officers suffered similarly for 
this “German propaganda.” 
The only credit in silvicultural direction which be- 
longs to the French foresters is the development of new 
and fertile ideas regarding the operations of thinnings; 
here the differentiation of the crop into the final harvest 
(le haut) and the nurse crop (le bas) (see page 105) and 
the differentiation of the operations, par le haut and par 
le bas, seems to have been for the first time described by 
Boppe in 1887. Indeed, the theory of thinnings, at least, 
seems to have been well understood by Buffon, who ad- 
vanced his theories in a memoir to the Academy of 
France in 1774, and gives a very clear exposition of the 
value of thinnings and improvement cuttings. 
