294 
DEMAND FOR WOOD. 
and, but for improvements in metallurgy which have facili¬ 
tated the substitution of iron for that material, the last twenty- 
five years would almost have stripped Europe of her only 
heard of several instances where tracts of fine forest, hundreds and even 
thousands of acres in extent, have been purchased and felled, solely to 
supply timber for this purpose. 
The demand for wood for small carvings and for children’s toys is in¬ 
credibly large. Rentzsch states the export of such objects from the town 
of Sonneberg alone to have amounted, in 1853, to 60,000 centner, or three 
thousand tons’ weight .—Dcr Wald , p. 68. 
The importance of so managing the forest that it may continue indefi¬ 
nitely to furnish an adequate supply of material for naval architecture is 
well illustrated by some remarks of the same author in the valuable little 
work just cited. He suggests that the prosperity of modern England is 
due, in no small degree, to the supplies of wood and other material for 
building and equipping ships, received from the forests of her colonies and 
of other countries with which she has maintained close commercial rela¬ 
tions, and he adds: “ Spain, which by her position seemed destined for 
universal power, and once, in fact, possessed it, has lost her political rank, 
because during the unwise administration of the successors of Philip II, 
the empty exchequer could not furnish the means of building new fleets; 
for the destruction of the forests had raised the price of timber above the 
resources of the state .”—Der Wald , p. 63. 
The market price of timber, like that of all other commodities, may be 
said, in a general way, to be regulated by the laws of demand and supply, 
but it is also controlled by those seemingly unrelated accidents which so 
often disappoint the calculations of political economists in other branches 
of commerce. A curious case of this sort is noticed by Cerini, DelV 
Impianto e Conservazione dei Boschi , p. 17: “In the mountains on the 
Lago Maggiore, in years when maize is cheap, the woodcutters can pro¬ 
vide themselves with corn meal enough for a week by three days’ labor, 
and they refuse to work the remaining four. Hence the dealers in wood, 
not being able to supply the demand, for want of laborers, are obliged to 
raise the price for the following season, both for timber and for firewood; 
so that a low price of grain occasions a high price of building lumber and 
of fuel. The consequence is, that though the poor have supplied them¬ 
selves cheaply with food, they must pay dear for firewood, and they can¬ 
not get work, because the high price of lumber has discouraged repairs 
and building, the expense of which landed proprietors cannot undertake 
when their incomes have been reduced by sales of grain at low rates, and 
hence there is not demand enough for lumber to induce the timber mer¬ 
chants to furnish employment to the woodmen.” 
