131 
WHAT FORESTRY HAS DONE. 
(Continued.) 
The following is reprinted from Circular 140, Forest Service, 
U. S. Department of Agriculture. 
GERMANY. 
The German Empire has nearly 35,000,000 acres of forest, of 
which 31.9 per cent, belongs to the State, 1.8 per cent, to the 
Crown, 16. 1 per cent, to communities, 46.5 per cent, to private per- 
sons, 1.6 per cent, to corporations, and the remainder to institu- 
tions and associations. There is a little over three-fifths of an 
acre of forest for each citizen, and though 53 cubic feet of wood 
to the acre is produced in a year, wood imports have increasingly 
exceeded wood exports for over forty years, and 300,000,000 cubic 
feet, valued at $80,000,000, or over one-sixth of the home con- 
sumption is now imported each year. Germany's drain on for- 
eign countries are in the following order: Austria-Hungary, 
19,750,000 tons ; Russia and Finland, 18,000,000 tons ; Sweden, 
508,000 tons ; the United States, 360,000 tons ; Norway, 49,000 
tons.* 
German forestry is remarkable in three ways. It has always 
led in scientific thoroughness, and now it is working out results 
with an exactness almost equal to that of the laboratory ; it has 
applied this scientific knowledge with the greatest technical sue* 
cess ; and it has solved the problem of securing: through a long 
series of years an increasing forest output and increasing profits 
at the same time. 
Like other advanced European countries, Germany felt the 
pinch of wood shortage a hundred and fifty years ago, and though 
this shortage was relieved by the coming of the railroads, which 
opened up new forests, and by the use of coal, which substituted 
a new fuel for wood, the warning was heeded, and systematic 
State forestry was begun. After all, the scare was not a false 
one, for even today Germany is not independent as regards wood, 
since she has to import one-sixth of all she uses. 
In addition to the wood-supply question, Germany was forced 
tc undertake forestry by the need of protecting agriculture and 
stream flow. The troubles which France was having with her 
mountain torrents opened the eyes of the Germans to the dangers 
from floods in their own land. As a result the maintenance of 
* According to the kind of wood, a ton is equivalent to from about 500 
to about 1,000 board feet. 
