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Forest areas in Europe and America, and probable future timber supplies
Forest areas in Europe and America and probable future timber supplies Author:Lyons Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in house construction. Out of 1,820,000 inhabited houses in the central governments of Kin/an, Tula, Kaluga, Orel, Kursk, Voronetz, Tamboff, and Penpa, only 74,0... more »00 are built with stone and mortar, and in the governments of Moscow, Ivor, Yaroslav, Kostroma, Nijni Novgorod, and Vladimir, out of 1,400,000, only 6,800 are built of stone and mortar. How frequently these wooden houses have to be renewed is tolerably well shown, says Mr. Herbert, by the saying that Russia is burnt down every seven years. Forest fires must also be taken into consideration, by which timber is said to ba destroyed of an average estimated value of £10,000,000 yearly. It will thus be seen that, between forest waste, forest fires, imperfectly grown woodlands, and home consumption, a very ample reduction must be made in the forest wealth of Russia before she is able to make any very considerable contribution to the wants of the world at large in timber. That a full sense of the want of afforesting is felt by Russia herself is shown by the continuous action of several of her ablest statesmen in promoting tree-planting on the vast steppes of southern Russia. This enterprise has been in operation for more than a quarter of a century, and vast tracts of the once barren steppes are now covered with successful plantations, which are not less important from a climatic than from an agricultural standpoint, as the protection they afford has enabled corn and other crops to be raised where bleak and barren sands alone previously prevailed. I have dwelt thus in detail on the question of Russian forests because of the general and vague expectations entertained as to the unlimited supplies to be derived from that country. The sum of Mr. Herbert's very industrious labours appears to be that, after allRussia's owndemands...« less