In the old forest
ordinances especial weight is, with good reason, laid upon the
protection of the oak-trees. Even the German Reichstag, as early as the
sixteenth century, was occupied with the "art of economizing the woods."
There are a few kinds of forestry which, to a certain extent, permit the
parceling off of the forest--as, for example, there are localities where
forestry and agriculture are carried on, turn and turn about, on the
same land; or others where the practice prevails of stripping the bark
off the oak-trees, a process which yields a quick monetary return--these
few kinds of forestry, however, which are favorable to the parceling off
of the woodland into small estates, quite destroy the conception of the
forest as we understand it. An oak-forest like the above, which, as soon
as the trees begin to grow really strong and sturdy, stretches forth
toward the wanderer only slim, bark-stripped trunks with withered
remnants of leaves, interspersed with rank miserable meadow-trees, with
hazel-nut thickets and dog-rose bushes, a piece of woodland in which
husbandry and forestry are completely jumbled, is actually no longer a
real forest. The most valuable kind of timber furnished by the massive
trunks of the oaks and beeches and for which there is absolutely no
substitute elsewhere--this most specific treasure of the forest can be
obtained only when the forest is managed by a rich corporation which can
afford to wait a hundred years for the interest on its capital.
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