Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/375

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The natural condition of eastern North America is that of a forest-covered land. Wherever the primeval woodland has been cleared there springs up, unless thwarted by persistent tillage, a sturdy "second growth" which in time, and if allowed to spread, would restore the face of the country to something of its former appearance. We are familiar enough with such tracts, abandoned by men as unprofitable for cultivation and left to the genial influence of birds and winds and the chemistry of humus soils—nature's way of getting back to original conditions. These delectable places are the "woods," scattered in patches of greater or less extent throughout the farming districts, covering the slopes of hills and the windings of valley streams—places of little value in the economic eye save for a few cords of firewood or as a trifling source of timber, but rich withal in youthful associations.

The primitive Atlantic forest was, for a space of three hundred years after the discovery, a dominant feature in the history of the country. For a long period its impenetrable solitudes limited the spread of settlement to a narrow seaboard margin; only the more intrepid of the newcomers plunged into its depths to meet with strange adventures. The valleys of the larger rivers formed natural highways into the interior of this forest region and the broad tracts of rich bottom-land gradually became, in favorable situations, the sites of settlement, widely scattered at first, but advancing farther and farther inland as population increased.

It is hard for us, dwelling in the long-settled land, to appreciate the attitude of the early colonists toward the forest. Fear mingled with curiosity was undoubtedly the chief state of mind of the first comers. Clearing the land had a twofold purpose—for planting ("plantation" was the word used in all early writings concerning the colonies) and to satisfy a feeling of domesticity that was ingrained in the European mind—an inherited instinct to civilize. To these people the forest was a dreadful reality (some early writers speak of it as a "Desert"), full of unknown terrors, and, especially to the Puritan and Jesuit, a haunt of the Powers of Darkness. On the whole the French settlers took more kindly to the forest than did the Anglo-Saxon peoples, who from the outset evinced a ruthless determination to clear the land. The ancient wood steadily receded, slowly at first, then rapidly as the planted country widened its borders, forest everywhere giving way to field, and with it vanished much that was aboriginal.

"Pine-tree State" and "Pine-tree Shilling" were terms of no empty meaning in the region where they originated. In northern New England the white pine is still the most characteristic tree over wide areas of unimproved land, and a well-defined "pine belt" reaches