62 THE \i.\NA'ii:Mi';\ r ok kimmv ; kok::st. 



to the precise treatment which a patient should undergo thai the matter should 

 be decided by a jury of our " intelligent countrymen." 



And now I leave the question in your hands. For my own -part I am glad to 

 state that I feel no alarm as to the future of the Forest under the present manage- 

 ment. The Editor of" The Gardener's Magazine" — whom I again quote as a 

 hostile witness — says " there is, of course, no cause for alarm as to the future of 

 the Forest." The question before us appears to me to resolve itself into a simple 

 quantitative one as to the number of trees which, in the judgment of those who 

 are responsible, it has been thought necessary to remove. It is absurd to speak 

 of the danger of the Forest being made into a park ; you must have realised th: 

 absurdity of this notion for yourselves this afternoon, for you have been through 

 portions of the Forest from which some thousands of trees have been removed 

 since last autumn. There is nothing, in my humble opinion, very park-like about 

 the result so far. It is doing an injustice to the Conservators and the Verderers, 

 and, I will add, to Mr. E. N. Buxton in particular, to suppose that they or he has 

 any such ulterior design upon our favourite haunt. And when considering this 

 question of the amount of thinning, will you kindly make a correction for what 

 might be called the " personal equation " of the Forest conditions. For the 

 stacked heaps of felled trunks have not all been cut down from the immediate 

 area surrounding them, as some of the correspondents seem to imagine, but have 

 been gathered together from a very much wider area, and therefore give an idea 

 of destruction which to the unitiated may appear highly exaggerated — not to say 

 appalling. Also, be it remembered, that the thinning and pruning of trees has to 

 be done at a period of the year when there is no foliage, and this is another factor 

 of exaggeration. And lastly, may I appeal to those critics of the recent doings 

 who are present — and there are many whose opinions I shall estimate most 

 higlily — io favour the meeting with their views as to what ought to be done, as 

 well as what ought not to have been done, for there has as yet been nothing tj 

 sp.ak of by way oi construclive criticism. If these gentlemen would give us their 

 views as to what the Forest ought in their opinion to be, and how in their 

 judgment this result is to be achieved , then we can meet on common ground as 

 naturalists and as lovers of the picturesque, and a useful discussion can be held 

 in accordance with the scientific and aesthetic spirit which has prompted the 

 summoning of the present meeting. 



Mr. A. D. Webster was next asked to favour the meeting with his views, but 

 he begged to be excused from doing so, having been chosen as one of the experts 

 to report upon the Forest, and he thought it best to reserve any observations 

 until he and his colleagues officially reported. 



Mr. Percy Lindley admitted that it was he who wrote the letter in " The Times " 

 of April 2nd, alluded to above b}' Prof. Meldola. He thought it only fair to 

 quote the opinion given by Prof. Meldola in 1882 (in vol. iii. of the " Proceedings 

 of the Essex Field Club "), and to place in juxtaposition the Professor's statements 

 in "The Times" of March 31st. Mr. Lindley then spoke of the slope in the 

 Forest, near his house at York Hill. One morning he found a number of men 

 going through it — as if they were a sort of scythe — and clearing away the 

 unciergrowth, leaving only a few oatches he.e and there ; cutting down sound 

 trees, and leaving a few rotten pollards. On Fairmead, three or four seasons ago, 

 he was astounded to see that j'oung spear trees — the trees that were to form the 

 future fortst — were being laid low, and he wrote to Mr. Buxton, who replied that 

 he had marked trees to be cut down, and then somebody else went through and 

 cut down the trees which he had wished to spare. He went on to complain that 



