IN 1881 there was published in Warsaw, in the Russian language, a volume entitled A Critical Examination of the Forest System in the Kingdom of Poland, by A. Krause, teacher in the College of Agriculture and Forestry in Neu- Alexandria. In this he gives the history of forests and woodcraft in Poland from the earliest times to the present day, with many curious extracts from original documents and authorities. The first period comprises heathen times, when forests were surrounded by mystery and superstitious observances.
The second period extends from the introduction of Christianity in A.D. 860, to the extinction of Polish independence in 1796. In the earlier centuries Poland seems to have been almost covered with immense masses of pine, oak, beech, spruce, lime, larch, and yew. These forests swarmed with wild bison, beavers, wild horses, wild boar, red deer, elk and roe deer, bears, wolves, and lynxes. In the fourteenth century, however, man seems to have reclaimed much of the wilderness. Forest statutes were published by Casimir the Great in 1347. A few titles from this ordinance are:
(1.) De his qui in silvis alienis damna faciunt, concerning persons doing damage in the woods of others.
(2.) De incendentibus silvas vel gams alienas, concerning persons cutting down the woods or field trees of others.
(3.) Si alienos porcos in tua silva reperias, if thou findest another man's swine in thy wood.
(4.) De silvis glandariis et faguriis, concerning woods for the production of oak-mast and beech-mast.
(5.) De incendiirus, concerning fire raising.
' Between 1796 and 1807 the separation of forests into blocks was commenced. And in 1808 the French civil code, with its enactments regarding the working of forests was introduced.'
In 1858 Baron von Berg, Oberforstrath in Saxony, was applied to professionally to examine and report on the state of the forests and of forest management in Finland. Thereafter he was applied to to do the same in Poland; and he embodied his views in Denkschrift iiber das Forst- Wesen in Polen, which was published in Leipsic in 1864 or 1865. Thereafter there was introduced into the management of the forests the German methods of treatment, but, as a forest official remarked to me with a shrug, the principles are the same; but the application of them, controlled by circumstances, soil, situation, climate, forest products, &c., is ons thing in Germany, it is a very different thing in Poland, and necessarily so. According to Herr Krause the estimates for all forest operations must be prepared some years beforehand. Every forest must be surveyed, and charts of it mapped out to a scale of 1 = 20,000, in which one English mile would be represented by about an inch. Smaller plans must also be prepared to a scale of three miles to an inch. A block coincides, as a rule, with the district perambulated by one under-forester, Each block is divided into four divisions, and each division is subdivided into fifteen compartments. In each compartment all the trees are intended to be as nearly as possible of one age or varying by not more than thirty years. An interval of thirty years is allowed after maturity for seeding and ensuring natural reproduction. Each division, if perfect according to plan, should contain fifteen different classes, or ages, of timber. This implies for each division, as also for the whole block or forest, that each tree should be felled between the ages of 120 and 150 years. The rotation of felling, instead of being directed, as is most usual, from east to west, proceeds in regular order in each division, from south-east towards the
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north-west. The avenues and paths bounding the compartments, run in parallel straight lines from north-east to south-west, with the other avenues intersecting them not quite at right angles. The compartments have been almost always made equal in area, without taking account of the difference in the qualities of soil. Each compartment (according as the forest surveyor shall direct in his estimates) must either be parcelled out into thirty yearly portions, or, its cubic contents having been measured, and its rate of increase ascertained, equal solid quantities of timber is felled in each year of the thirty. In general the latter method is prescribed as being more favourable to the ripening of seed, and the ripening of seedlings with little artificial assistance. Compartments occupied by coppice or by coppice with reserved trees (compound coppice) are parcelled out into equal yearly portions.