In 1903, a more thorough organization of this work took place, which, with liberal appropriations, promises more rapid progress.
This law recognizes two ways of placing private property under a forestry regime, namely obligatory and facultative or voluntary. Territory in the mountains and on dunes may if deemed by the superior Agricultural Council as requiring it from the point of view of public utility be placed under the regime by royal decree. Or else private owners may ask to have their properties so placed, either merely securing police protection, obligating themselves to keep the property wooded, or working under a working plan or reforestation plan provided by the Forest Service.
In either case the owner is obliged to pay the guards and at the rate of about 2 cents per acre for the working plans. Planting material is furnished free or at cost price, and exemption from taxes for 20 years is granted for reforested lands. Expropriation of waste lands declared as of public interest is provided, if owners object to enforced reforestation. Some 275,000 acres have so far been placed under the forestry regime.
There are provisions for forestry education in the School of Agriculture at Lisbon, or the education for the higher positions in the forest service may be secured at German or French forest schools, and some have secured it at Vallambrosa.
GREAT BRITAIN AND HER COLONIES.
Historical Inquiries concerning Forests and Forest Laws, by Percival Lewis, 1811, gives a full account of the practices in the old ban forests.
English Forests and Forest Trees, 1853, anonymous, gives an interesting account of the old ‘forests’ and their history.
Our Forests and Woodlands, by John Nisbet, 1900, has a chapter on the historical development of forest laws.
Wm. Schlich, Manual of Forestry, vol. I, 3d ed., 1906, brings in convenient form an account of conditions in various parts of the British Empire.
Schwappach, Forstliche Zustände in England, Zeitschrift für Forst- und Jagdwesen, 1903, is an account of forest conditions from the pen of a practical observer.
B. Ribbentrop, Forestry in India, 1900. Also various reports of the forest departments of the various British Colonies.
It is a remarkable fact that the nation which can boast of the most extensive forest department in one of her colonies, has at home not yet been able to come to an intelligent conception even, not to speak of application, of proper forest policy or forest economy.
One of the English authorities on the subject writes still in 1900: “With so much land of poor quality lying uncultivated in many parts of the British Isles, the apathy shown towards forestry in Britain is one of the things that it is impossible to understand.”