FORESTRY 193 
forthcoming, no doubt a vast amount of good practical work 
would be done. 
Next comes France, at this day an enlightened country as 
regards forestry, and whose famous enterprise of planting with 
pines a desolate and unhealthy district of one and a half million 
acres in extent on the “Landes” not far from Bordeaux, with 
the result that after thirty years and thenceforth, it maintains 
in prosperity a population of one and a half million people 
instead of a few thousand paupers as formerly, is pointed out 
to all students of forestry as a record performance. Gaul, we 
read, was in Caesar’s days covered with dark forests, broken 
here and there by cultivated clearings, but later the slopes of 
Provence and Rousillon were denuded of wood and stood bare, 
as did Greece, this last-named country, be it observed, having been 
civilised at an earlier epoch. The great French school of forestry 
at Nancy is well known, and there are many other schools 
throughout the country teaching the same science. The French, 
however, are not always consistent, and Sir John Lubbock tells 
us in The Beauties of Nature, how two departments — the Hautes- 
and Basses-Alps — are being ruined by the destruction of forests. 
The next country is Italy, the centre of that once mighty 
empire that held the Mediterranean Sea as a Roman lake. We 
ought to expect great things here, and great things we shall 
find, for it was the neglect of forestry that caused the downfall 
of Rome from her position as the mistress of the world ; and it 
is its continued neglect that keeps- Italy poor. The real strength 
and backbone of a nation consists in its having a large and 
healthy rural population : from such people alone can great 
and powerful .armies be raised. When the Romans gradually 
destroyed their forests, as every other power had done before 
them to their own destruction, rain became scanty, streams 
dried up, and the climate became hot and sultry, agriculture 
declined, work in the fields diminished, the country people 
became poor, idle, and ill-fed, and steadily deteriorated in 
physique, they decreased in numbers, many of them crowded 
into the towns, and the manly virtues disappeared. Then 
were there no strong right arms at home to defend the 
heart of the empire, and Rome had to rely on foreign and 
colonial mercenaries, and the help of doubtful allies, with what 
result all students of history know well. I could quote much 
to show to what a vast extent Roman forests were cut down, 
but space will allow but one line from Marny, the French writer, 
“ The great plain of the Po is completely divested of forests, 
there is not a single conifera in it.” The floods in Italy, that 
were in November, 1896, so destructive to life and property, were 
the result of the trees having been removed from the sides of 
the mountains. But modern Italians are not all ignorant of 
the cause of such disasters, for they have a forest school at 
V allombrosa. 
Giles A. Daubeny. 
(To be continued.) 
