1868.] DAWSON — RESTORATION OP FORESTS. 407 



districts in Nova Scotia and the neighbouring colonies ; and as 

 these burned tracts could not be immediately occupied for agri- 

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

 timber, they have been left to the unaided efforts of nature 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 a paper by the late Mr. Titus Smith of Halifax, a few 

 statements on this subject, which, as the results of long and 

 careful observation, are entitled to much respect, and may form 

 the groundwork for the remarks which are to follow. 



" 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 similar 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 portions, the blueberry appears almost every- 

 where; great fields of red raspberries and fire- weed or French 

 willow spring up along the edges of the beech and hemlock land, 

 and abundance of red-berried elder and wild red-cherry appears soon 

 after ; but in a few years the raspberries and most of the herbage 

 disappear, and are followed by a growth of firs, white and yellow 

 birch, and poplar. When a succession of fires has occurred, small 

 shrubs occupy the barren, the Kalmia or sheep-poison being the 

 most abundant ; and, in the course of ten or twelve years, form 

 so much turf, that a thicket of small alder begins to grow, under 

 the shelter of which fir, spruce, hackmatack (Larix Americana) 

 and white birch spring up. When the ground is thoroughly 

 shaded by a thicket twenty feet high, the species which originally 

 occupied the ground begins to prevail, and suffocate the wood 

 which sheltered it; and within sixty years, the land will generally 

 be covered with a young growth of the same kind that it produced 

 of old." Assuming the above statements to be a correct summary 

 of the principal modes in which forests are reproduced, we may 

 proceed to consider them more in detail. 



1st. Where the forest trees are merely cut down and not 



