In Saxony: at Tharand.
In Württemberg: at Tübingen.
In Baden: at Carlsruhe.
In Hesse: at Giessen.
In the grand-duchy of Saxony: at Eisenach.
The schools at Munich, Tübingen and Giessen form part of the universities at these places; that at Carlsruhe is attached to the technical high school; the others are academies for the study of forestry only, but there is a tendency to transfer them all to the universities. The subordinate staff are trained for their work in so-called silvicultural schools, of which a large number exist. In this way the German forests have been brought to a high degree of productiveness, but the material derived from them falls far short of the requirements, although the forests occupy 26% of the total area of the country; hence the net imports of timber amount already to 4,600,000 tons a year, and they are steadily rising.
France.—The principal timber tree of France is the oak. The cork oak is grown extensively in the south and in Corsica. The beech, ash, elm, maple, birch, walnut, chestnut and poplar are all important trees, while the silver fir and spruce form magnificent forests in the Vosges and Jura Mountains, and the Aleppo and maritime pines are cultivated in the south and south-west. About one-seventh of the entire territory is still covered with wood.
Forest legislation took its rise in France about the middle of the 16th century, and the great minister Sully urged the enforcement of restrictive forest laws. In 1669 a fixed treatment of state forests was enacted. Duhamel in 1755 published his famous work on forest trees. Reckless destruction of the forests, however, was in progress, and the Revolution of 1789 gave a fresh stimulus to the work of devastation. The usual results have followed in the frequency and destructiveness of floods, which have washed away the soil from the hillsides and valleys of many districts, especially in the south, and the frequent inundations of the last fifty years are no doubt caused by the deforesting of the sources of the Rhone and Saône. Laws were passed in 1860 and 1864, providing for the reforesting, “reboisement,” of the slopes of mountains, and these laws take effect on private as well as state property. Thousands of acres are annually planted in the departments of Hautes and Basses Alpes; and during the summer of 1875, when much injury was done by floods in the south of France, the Durance, formerly the most dangerous in this respect of French rivers, gave little cause for anxiety, as it is round the head waters of this river that the chief plantations have been formed. While tracts formerly covered with wood have been replanted, plantations have been formed on the shifting sands or dunes along the coast of Gascony. A forest of Pinus pinaster, 150 m. in length, now stretches from Bayonne to the mouth of the Gironde, raised by means of sowing steadily continued since 1789; the cultivation of the pine, along with draining, has transformed low marshy grounds into productive soil extending over an area of about two million acres. The forests thus created provide annually some 600,000 tons of pit timber for the Welsh coal mines.
The state forest department is administered by the director-general, who has his headquarters at Paris, assisted by a board of administration, charged with the working of the forests, questions of rights and law, finance and plantation works.
The department is supplied with officers from the forest school at Nancy. This institution was founded in 1824, when M. Lorentz, who had studied forestry in Germany, was appointed its first director.