Beproduction of Forests in British North America. 263 



merely scorched, — to such a degree, however, as in most 

 cases to cause their death ; some trees, such as the birches, 

 probably from the more inflammable nature of their outer 

 bark, being more easily killed than others. Where the woods 

 consist of softwood or coniferous trees, the fire often leaves 

 nothing but bare trunks and branches, or at most a little fo- 

 liage, scorched to a rusty-brown colour. In either case, a 

 vast quantity of wood remains unconsumed, and soon becomes 

 sufficiently dry to furnish food for a new conflagration ; so 

 that the same portion of forest is liable to be repeatedly 

 burned, until it becomes a bare and desolate *' barren," with 

 only a few charred and wasted trunks towering above the 

 blackened surface. This has been the fate of large districts 

 in Nova Scotia and the neighbouring colonies ; and as these 

 burned tracts could not be immediately occupied for agricul- 

 tural purposes, and are diminished in value by the loss of 

 their timber, they have been left to the unaided efforts of na- 

 ture to restore their original verdure. Before proceeding to 

 consider more particularly the mode in which this restoration 

 is effected, and the appearances by which it is accompanied, 

 I may quote, from an article in a colonial periodical, the views 

 of Mr Titus Smith, secretary of the Board of Agriculture 

 of Nova Scotia, on this subject. These views, as the results 

 of long and careful observation, are entitled to much respect. 

 *' If an acre or two be cut down in the midst of a forest, 

 and then neglected, it will soon be occupied by a growth simi- 

 lar to that which was cut down ; but when all the timber, on 

 tracts of great size, is killed by fires, except certain parts of 

 swamps, a very different growth springs up ; at first a great 

 number of herbs and shrubs, which did not grow on the land 

 when covered by living wood. The turfy coat, filled with 

 the decaying fibres of the roots of the trees and plants of the 

 forest, now all killed by the fire, becomes a kind of hot-bed, 

 and seeds which had lain dormant for centuries, spring up 

 and flourish in the mellow soil. On the most barren por- 

 tions, the blueberry appears almost everywhere ; great fields 

 of red raspberries and fire-weed or French willow, spring up 

 along the edges of the beech and hemlock land, and abun- 

 dance of redberried- elder and wild redcherry appear soon 



