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AMERICAN FORESTS.

AMERICAN HE American mind has so long been trained to regard a tree as a natural

enemy that the prejudice seems now as diﬁicult to eradicate as to uproot one of the giants of the “ forest primeval.” As a shelter for a savage foe, as an obstacle to be removed before corn could be

planted, it fell before the axe of the sturdy pioneer of the Western World; yet the needless destruction of the for ests was an idea inherited from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, who, long before they heard of the discovery of a new continent, had swept down with unspar

ing hand the forests of England and Scotland. It was not until the time of Charles the First that an alarm was sounded through Great Britain that the

woods were falling too rapidly, and that im mediate and active measures were needed

to prevent those islands from becoming entirely denuded of trees and unﬁt for the habitation of man. While the Puritans in New England and the Cavaliers in Virginia had begun, on American soil, another act of the

sylvan drama they had learned so well at

FORESTS.

this work so well that his name will be kept for ever green in the woods of his native land. Evelyn’s books are now seldom met with except in old libraries ; but his true love of nature and quick perceptions, his earnest loyalty and desire to improve his age and generation, make these volumes, though old-fashioned in language and ob solete in the botanical learning of the present time, some of the pleasantest summer-reading in the language. Evelyn wrote of what he saw and knew; and

though sometimes affected by the super stitions that hung around woodcraft in that age, he brought together so much practical knowledge that, even in the greater light of the nineteenth century, his general rules are followed and his conclusions considered correct. Nature

is ever the same: “ Oh there is not lost One of earth‘: charms: upon her bosom yet, After the ﬂight of untold centuries,

The freshness of her far beginning lies."

We have alluded to the wholesale de struction of the British forests, yet it is

home, the people of the mother-coun try were bewailing the scarceness of

true that the early Saxon kings protected

wood for ship-building, for fuel and

tious reverence paid to it by the Druids, but on account of its acorns, which were

other domestic purposes. The ﬁrst need of a country, and that an island which had just made itself mistress of the seas, was felt in her ships : timber could

not be had at the royal dock-yards.

the oak, not only because of the supersti

the food of the serfs and the swine.

The

earliest recorded notice of the oak tree in England is found in the Saxon Chroni cles. About the end of the seventh

century, King Ina, among the few laws

Government took the alarm, and John Evelyn was appointed by the Royal So ciety, at the command of the king, to repair, if possible, the waste of the

and destroying these trees penal, and

forests.

those who did so clandestinely were

Evelyn was a country gentleman, and,

which he enacted to regulate the simple economy of his subjects, made injuring

ﬁned thirty shillings.

The very sound

although a courtier, he wa.s a true lover

of the axe was suﬁicient conviction, and

of sylyan pursuits and a practical man.

the man who felled a tree under whose

Not only by lectures and books did he

shadow thirty hogs could stand incurred a double penalty. Woods of old were

awaken the attention of his countrymen, but he taught by example how a private

gentleman could serve his country by planting and protecting trees, as well as

by ﬁghting for his king.

He performed

valued according to the number of hogs they could fatten; and in times of scarcity the acorns (or mast) were eaten by man, even after the introduction of rye and