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 depopulation and waste with which that once fertile soil and delicious climate are threatened.

The objects of the restoration of the forest are as multifarious 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 torrents, 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 effluvia, and, finally, furnish an inexhaustible and self-renewing supply of a material indispensable to so many purposes of domestic comfort, to the successful exercise of every art of peace, every destructive energy of war.

But our enumeration of the uses of trees is not yet complete. Besides the influence of the forest, in mountain ranges, as a means of preventing the scooping out of ravines and the accumulations of water which fill them, trees subserve a valuable purpose, in lower positions, as barriers against the spread of floods and of the material they transport with them; but this will be more appropriately considered in the chapter on the waters; and another very important use of trees, that of fixing movable sand-dunes, and reclaiming them to profitable cultivation, will be pointed out in the chapter on the sands.

The vast extension of railroads, of manufactures and the mechanical arts, of military armaments, and especially of the commercial fleets and navies of Christendom within the present century, has greatly augmented the demand for wood, and, but for improvements in metallurgy which have facilitated the substitution of iron for that material, the last twenty-five years would almost have stripped Europe of her only remaining trees fit for such uses. The walnut trees alone felled in Europe within two years to furnish the armies of America with gunstocks, would form a forest of no inconsiderable extent.