FORESTS OF GERMANY. 
299 
Germany, from character of surface and climate, and from 
the attention which has long been paid in all the German 
States to sylviculture, is, taken as a whole, in a far better con¬ 
dition in this respect than its more southern neighbors; but in 
the Alpine provinces of Bavaria and Austria, the same improvi¬ 
dence which marks the rural economy of the corresponding dis¬ 
tricts of Switzerland, Italy, and France, is producing effects 
hardly less disastrous. As an instance of the scarcity of fuel in 
some parts of the territory of Bavaria, where, not long since, 
wood abounded, I may mention the fact that the water of salt 
springs is, in some instances, conveyed to the distance of sixty 
railroads which passed through the woods; hut the managers of the roads 
refused to receive it as freight, because the opening of a new market 
for wood might raise the price of the fuel they employed for their loco¬ 
motives. 
Hohenstein, who Was long professionally employed as a forester in Rus¬ 
sia, describes the consequences of the general war upon the woods in that 
country as already most disastrous, and as threatening still more ruinous 
evils. The river Volga, the life artery of Russian internal commerce, is 
drying up from this cause, and the great Muscovite plains are fast ad¬ 
vancing to a desolation like that of Persia .—Der Wald , p. 223. 
The level of the Caspian Sea is eighty-three feet lower than that of the 
Sea of Azoff, and the surface of Lake Aral is fast sinking. Von Baer 
maintains that the depression of the Caspian was produced by a sudden 
subsidence, from geological causes, and not gradually by excess of evapo¬ 
ration over supply. See Kaspische Studien , p. 25. But this subsidence 
diminished the area, and consequently the evaporation of that sea, and the 
rivers which once maintained its ancient equilibrium ought to raise it to 
its former level, if their own flow had not been diminished. It is, indeed, 
not proved that the laying bare of a wooded country diminishes the total 
annual precipitation upon it; but it is certain that the summer evaporation 
from the surface of a champaign region, like that through which the 
Volga, its tributaries, and the feeders of Lake Aral flow, is increased by 
the removal of its woods. Hence, though as much rain may still fall in 
the valleys of those rivers as when their whole surface was covered with 
forests, a less quantity of water may be delivered by them since their 
basins were cleared, and therefore the present condition of the inland 
waters in question may be due to the removal of the forests in their 
basins. 
