156 
duces both pine timber and resin, upon the yield of which the 
present valuation is based. 
La Sologne, in the central part of the country between the 
rivers Loire and Cher, was once densely wooded, but was for 
two centuries steadily deforested. By the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century 1,250,000 acres had been utterly abandoned. 
Owing to the nature of the soil and subsoil, drainage was neces- 
sary as a first step toward reclaiming this land with forest. About 
the middle of the nineteenth century a committee of private citi- 
zens, under the presidency of the director-general of forests, be- 
gan the work of reclamation. A canal 25 miles long and 350 
miles of roads were built, and 200,000 acres of nonagricultural 
land were planted with pine. In spite of the fact that one of the 
species planted proved a failure and another kind of pine had to 
be substituted, the restoration work has resulted in a forest prop- 
erty worth $18,000,000, and land which could be bought for $4 
an acre fifty years ago is now yielding $3 an acre net annual 
revenue. 
The arid limestone wastes of the province of Champagne have 
been partly reclaimed by forest planting. Two hundred thousand 
acres, planted at a cost of $10 per acre, have now risen in value 
from $4 to $40 per acre, with a total value of $10,000,000 and a 
net annual revenue of $2 per acre. 
The private forests of France are being freely sold. Specula- 
tors buy them, strip them, and sell them for grazing purposes. 
In this way hilltops and hillsides are being rapidly denuded. 
This threatens erosion and the silting of farm lands in l T ie valleys 
bv the washing town of infertile soil. The terribly destructive 
floods of the present vear could not have been so violent had the 
hills of France been kept clothed in forest. 
In France, then, forestry has decreased the danger from floods, 
which threatened to destroy vast areas of fertile farms, and in 
doing so has added many millions of dollars to the National 
wealth in new forests. It has removed the danger from sand 
dunes : and in their place has created a property worth many mil- 
lions of dollars. Applied to the State forests, which are small in 
comparison with the Xational Forests of this countrv, it causes 
them to vield each year a net revenue of more than $4,700,000, 
though the sum spent on each acre for management is over 100 
times greater than that spent on the forests of the United States. 
France and Germany together have a population of 100,000,000, 
in round numbers, against our probable 85,000,000, and State 
forests of 14.500,000 acres against our 160,000,000 acres of Na- 
tional Forests : but France and Germany spend on their forests 
$11,000,000 a vear and o- e t from them in net returns $30,000,000 
a vear, while the United States spent on the National Forests last 
year $1,400,000 and secured a net return of less than $130,000. 
(To be continued.) 
