292 
FORESTS OF EUROPE. 
injurious numbers only where a wide extent of surface is bare 
of woods. 
Utility of the Forest. 
In most parts of Europe, the woods are already so nearly 
extirpated that the mere protection of those which now exist 
is by no means an adequate remedy for the evils resulting 
from the want of them; and besides, as I have already said, 
abundant experience has shown that no legislation can secure 
the permanence of the forest in private hands. Enlightened 
individuals in most European states, governments in others, 
have made very extensive plantations,* and France has now 
set herself energetically at work to restore the woods in the 
southern provinces, and thereby to prevent the utter depopu¬ 
lation and waste with which that once fertile soil and delicious 
climate are threatened. 
The objects of the restoration of the forest are as multifari¬ 
ous as the motives that have led to its destruction, and as the 
evils which that destruction has occasioned. It is hoped that 
the planting of the mountains will diminish the frequency and 
violence of river inundations, prevent the formation of tor¬ 
rents, mitigate the extremes of atmospheric temperature, 
humidity, and precipitation, restore dried-up springs, rivulets, 
and sources of irrigation, shelter the fields from chilling and 
from parching winds, prevent the spread of miasmatic efiluvia, 
* England is, I believe, the only country where private enterprise has 
pursued sylviculture on a really great scale, though admirable examples 
have been set in many others on both sides of the Atlantic. In England 
the law of primogeniture, and other institutions and national customs 
which tend to keep large estates long undivided and in the same line of 
inheritance, the wealth of the landholders, and the difficulty of finding safe 
and profitable investments of capital, combine to afford encouragements 
for the plantation of forests, which nowhere else exist in the same degree. 
The climate of England, too, is very favorable to the growth of forest trees, 
though the character of surface secures a large part of the island from the 
evils which have resulted from the destruction of the woods elsewhere, 
and therefore their restoration is a matter of less geographical importance 
in England than on the Continent. 
