Connected with the larger farms of Norway and Sweden are cotters’ places—­farm laborers who have leased a small part of the farm for a definite period (often during their natural lives).  In some cases the cotter leases only a building with a garden attached; in other cases several acres of ground.  The cotter is usually required to work on the farm of the owner at certain times of the year for a small wage regulated by contract.  These cotters correspond to our truck farmers, and their plots of ground number about 35,000 on the outskirts of the cities and villages.  They raise potatoes and other vegetables, and hay enough to feed a horse and several cows.  In most cases the women and children 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 altitudes of the central part of the country the pine requires one hundred and fifty years, and rarely exceeds one hundred feet in height, and it decreases toward the coast and northwards.