ren do the work, while the men are engaged in other occupations.

It is no longer permitted to establish entails which can not be sold
or mortgaged, and the national government in recent years has sought
to further the partition and allotment of the common ownership
of land. Pastures and grazing lands are still often held by the
community, and similarly mountain pastures. But the community farms,
when the consent of all the part owners and tenants has been
secured, may now be partitioned by surveyors appointed by the public
authorities.

In the great timber districts of the mountain ranges, the trees are
felled in winter and the logs are dragged to the tops of the steep
mountain sides, where they are slid down to the river, or they are
carted on sledges to the river's edge. During the early summer, after
the ice has gone, and while the rivers are yet full of water, they
are floated down the streams to the sawmills. But, as the logs are
constantly being driven into corners or lodging against piers,
floaters are employed to keep the logs in the current. Log-floating is
both the most dangerous and the most unhealthful occupation in Norway.
Men often fall into the streams; they are forced to sleep on the cold
ground in uninhabited parts of the country; they frequently fall from
the rolling logs into the whirling currents and are tossed against
sharp rocks; and the marvel is not that the death-rate among floaters
is so high, but that any of them survive the perilous occupation.

The value of the exports of forest products and timber industries
reaches about eighteen million dollars a year, and the combined forest
industries furnish employment to a large number of laborers. The state
forests occupy about 3,500 square miles, more than half being located
in the northern provinces of Tromsoe and Finmark. The state also has
nurseries at Vossevangen and Hamar, and three forestry schools, by
means of which widespread interest in tree-planting has been aroused.
Destructive forest fires and the slaughter of the trees by the
remarkable development of the wood-pulp industries have emphasized in
recent times the need of larger forest reserves and closer government
supervision. Under the most favorable conditions, the pine requires
from seventy-five to one hundred years to yield timber twenty-five
feet in length and ten inches in diameter at the top. Spruce will
reach the same size in seventy-five to eighty years. In the higher
altitu