296 
FORESTS OF FRANCE. 
America with gunstocks, would form a forest ol no incon¬ 
siderable extent.* 
The Forests of Europe. 
Mirabeau estimated the forests of France in 1750 at seven¬ 
teen millions of hectares [42,000,000 acres] ; in 1860 they 
were reduced to eight millions [19,769,000 acres]. This 
would he at the rate of 82,000 hectares [202,600 acres] per 
year. Troy, from whose valuable pamphlet, Etude sur le 
Jdeboisement des Montagues , I take these statistical details, 
supposes that Mirabeau’s statement may have been an extrav¬ 
agant one, but it still remains certain that the w T aste has been 
enormous; for it is known that, in some departments, that of 
Ari&ge, for instance, clearing has gone on during the last half 
century at the rate of three thousand acres a year,f and in all 
parts of the empire trees have been felled faster than they 
have grown. The total area of France, excluding Savoy, is 
about one hundred and thirty-one millions of acres. The 
extent of forest supposed by Mirabeau would be about thirty- 
two per cent, of the whole territory.]; In a country and a 
climate where the conservative influences of the forest are so 
necessary as in France, trees must cover a large surface and be 
it is difficult to suppose could be consumed in tlie city of Paris. The price 
of fire wood has scarcely advanced at all in Paris for half a century, though 
that of timber generally has risen enormously. 
* In the first two years of the present civil war in the United States, 
twenty-eight thousand walnut trees were felled to supply a single European 
manufactory of gun stocks for the American market. 
t Among the indirect proofs of the comparatively recent existence of 
extensive forests in France, may be mentioned the fact, that wolves were 
abundant, not very long since, in parts of the empire where there are now 
neither wolves nor woods to shelter them. Arthur Young more than once 
speaks of the “ innumerable multitudes ” of these animals which infested 
France in 1789, and George Sand states, in the Histoire de ma Vie , that 
some years after the restoration of the Bourbons, they chased travellers 
on horseback in the Southern provinces, and literally knocked at the doors 
of her father-in-law’s country seat. 
J In the Eecepte Veritable , Palissy having expressed his indignation at 
the folly of men in destroying the woods, his interlocutor defends the 
