Note 270 — Chapter III · (continued 3)

England is, I believe, the only country where private enterprise has pursued sylviculture on a really great scale, though admirable examples have been set in many others on both sides of the Atlantic. In England the law of primogeniture, and other institutions and national customs which tend to keep large estates long undivided and in the same line of inheritance, the wealth of the landholders, and the difficulty of finding safe and profitable investments of capital, combine to afford encouragements for the plantation of forests, which nowhere else exist in the same degree. The climate of England, too, is very favorable to the growth of forest trees, though the character of surface secures a large part of the island from the evils which have resulted from the destruction of the woods elsewhere, and therefore their restoration is a matter of less geographical importance in England than on the Continent.