28 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



them as they have much to do with, whether as herdsmen, as 

 cultivators of the soil, or as woodsmen. An American student, 

 however untravelled except in his own broad country, may have 

 gathered even here illustrations enough of the principle now under 

 consideration. 



To the colonists and early settlers of a new country no native 

 products of the soil are more important than the trees. Timber, 

 lumber, wood for all kinds of building and fencing purposes, for 

 the construction of bridges, vehicles, and household furniture, not 

 to speak of fuel, bark for tanning purposes, and in autumn mast of 

 nuts and acorns for the fattening of swine for the slaughter — these 

 are among the reasons why early settlers always located their first 

 domiciles along the edges of great forests. And now, if we remind 

 ourselves of certain conditions of the first colonists who came to 

 these shores from western Europe three centuries ago, we shall 

 realize that, while they found themselves in the midst of a land 

 bountifully supplied with timber, the particular kinds were new 

 and strange to them. Nothing was quite the same as anything 

 that they had known in the Old World; and no kind of informa- 

 tion would have been more welcome to these colonists than 

 that relating to the enduring and wearing qualities of the 

 woods of these different kinds of strange trees. Every kind 

 was untested, and there was no one to teach them. All had 

 to be learned by trial and experience. Yet not quite all; for, 

 to a band of colonists of three centuries ago, coming to these shores 

 from England, there must be credited such knowledge of English 

 trees and timber as was usual with Englishmen of that period; a 

 knowledge that would be of some service to them as American 

 colonists notwithstanding that American trees were of a much 

 greater number of species, and none quite identical with and 

 European kinds. They had brought with them across the sea a 

 knowledge of oak, walnut, chestnut, beech, elm, linden, and some 

 other trees. As for the chestnut, the beech, and the linden, they 

 found but one kind of each here, and these not very notably unlike 

 their congeneric European species. The settlers would naturally 

 expect to find the American trees of these sorts available for the 

 same economic purposes as their European allies. Neither as to the 

 aspect of the trees nor the qualities of their wood was there so 

 much difference; but with those very important timber trees, the 

 oak and the walnut, the case was different. In place of the one 

 European kind of walnut, the Virginian forests presentea them 

 with at least a half-dozen, each strikingly unlike the Old World 



