THE FOREST. 
167 
per cent., those held by corporations 12, those belonging to 
private individuals 53, and the remaining 5 per cent, is held to 
charitable uses. 
There is quite an army of foresters in Germany, about 
twelve thousand in all, with upper foresters and higher officers 
above them ; those of them who belong to the State are, in 
Prussia, under the Minister for Husbandry, Crown Lands and 
Forests. Throughout Germany there are various institutions 
for the training of these officials, who, in addition to preserving 
game, must have a competent knowledge of forestry, so as to 
be qualified to superintend the cutting down and planting of 
trees, the making of roads and other matters necessary to the 
maintenance and profitable working of the woods. The two 
forest academies for Prussia are situated, one at Eberswalde 
near Berlin, and the second at Miinden, not far from Cassel. 
The curriculum of studies include forest economy, botany, 
zoology, mathematics and geometry, natural history, forest law, 
road-making and physics. 
Foresters are to be seen everywhere, and are a fine lot of 
men. Those in the public service wear a uniform of light olive 
green, with buttons impressed with the royal eagle, and each has 
his portion of the forest under his charge. His house belongs to 
the State ; and so do the seventy or eighty acres of land that 
our forester farms. The rougher gamekeepers’ work, he told me, 
he had little to do with, as poaching is little known in his neigh- 
bourhood. This, however, is by no means universal, and I am 
informed that more than thirty foresters are shot each year in 
Germany by poachers ; particularly when harvest folk are about 
must the foresters be on the look out. On the sides of the 
German hills one sees practical forestry in operation, with large 
portions of the forest cut down as the trees come to maturity, 
and those tracts then replanted. 
Forests, then, are well cared for in German)^ and peasants 
are now prohibited from gathering leaves to use as fodder, as 
their doing so impoverished the woodlands, depriving them of 
their natural manure. I had good evidence of this law at Easter 
one year when taking a walk in the Thuringian forest, near 
Eisenach, where, in a gully, I waded almost waist deep in dead 
beech leaves. In Switzerland, where the forests belong princi- 
pally, if not entirely, to the people, they are managed wuth great 
care by communal and district councils ; and once when pick- 
ing wild strawberries in a young plantation above Clarens 1 was 
warned by a countryman that if caught I should surely be fined 
or sent to prison for damaging the young fir trees. There is a 
forest academy at Zurich. 
The importance of forestry is well understood also in 
Austria and France — and I believe in India, where I hope it is 
systematically practised. There was, when this article was 
written in 1892, a young Englishman destined for the forest 
department in the last-named country, studying at the academy 
