Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/334

320 developed from a School of Mines established as long ago as 1765. A forest institute was begun in 1807. Reorganizations have frequently taken place, until now the course of instruction is divided into six classes, two of which relate to forestry and forest engineering. The whole course is arranged for four years. From a memorial volume published recently, and soon after the celebration of the first centennial of the academy, it appears that it has graduated 5,373 pupils. The average annual attendance in recent years has been about 150.

Other schools of a lower grade, having a course of instruction of only one year in extent, are established at Aggsbach, in Lower Austria, and at Wildalpen, in Styria.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire has also many societies, which, though not schools of forestry, have a more or less direct relation to that subject and do much to promote it. Such are the Forest Society of the Tyrol, the Forestry Association of Manhartsburg, in Lower Austria, the Vienna Joint Stock Company for Forestry, the Forestry Company of Styria and Carinthia, the Association of Moravia and Bohemia, the Society of Western Galicia, and several others. In Croatia is a School of Agriculture and Forestry, with five professors, and a course of study of three years.

The Federal Union of the Swiss Cantons established a Polytechnic School at Zürich in 1855, in which a school of forestry forms the fifth division of instruction. The course of teaching extends to two years and a half. The separate cantons also make provision for elementary instruction in the science and art of forestry; and still further provision is made for the teaching of the subject. As different states or kingdoms have a common interest in the navigation of a river which flows through their territories, and will rightly insist upon its being unimpeded, so it has been found by the cantons that they often have a common interest in the preservation of forests which may be situated in separate cantons, because their effects reach far beyond their particular locality. One canton might be more harmed by the destruction of a forest belonging to another canton than that canton itself. Accordingly, through the influence of the Swiss Forestry Association and the help of others acting with them, the Federal Constitution was amended in 1873, by the adoption of an article declaring that "the Federal Union has the right of supervising structures for the protection of watercourses and of the forest police in the mountain-regions." In the exercise of this right, the Union in 1876 enacted a comprehensive law, embodied in thirty-one distinct articles, relating to the high surveillance of the Confederation over the police of forests in the elevated regions.

For the more effectual carrying out of this law, provision was made in the same year for holding what may be called forest institutes, in the several cantons, during two months every year. At these institutes practical instruction is given in forestry, little if any attention being