FORESTRY. 17 
doing our best to render growing woods incapable of producing 
fine park scenery. We have been taught to thin mercilessly—to 
allow no tree to interfere with another, thereby preventing the 
development of clean stems, and encouraging instead a wild pro- 
fusion of branches, as if the object had been to produce an 
orchard. Well, but it is argued, a regular forest, grown on conti- 
nental principles, is painfully monotonous. You will lose all the 
variety and life of an English park if you insist upon close canopy. 
My answer is that of all rural industries forestry, in its ordinary 
operations, is productive of the most picturesque scenes. 
THE AFFLUENCE OF LANDOWNERS. 
There is another and more pressing aspect of park manage- 
ment. British landowners are far less affluent than they were 
thirty, fifty, one hundred years ago; it is a question with many of 
them whether they can maintain their parks at all. Is it not sheer 
blindness to refuse to develop what may be rendered not only a 
source of regular income, but a reserve to be drawn upon in times 
of special pressure, such as the payment of death duties? Why, 
so far from destroying English park scenery, the application of. 
science and system to wood management may be the very means 
of saving many a park from the hammer or the speculative 
builder. 
Before it can be hoped that landowners will take that course, 
they must apply themselves vigorously to acquire the principles of 
the craft, unlearn a great deal that they have been taught, and 
harden their hearts to deal with their woods in general as a crop. 
GAME COVER. 
2nd. Game Cover—This is perhaps the point at which British 
landowners and foresters are most directly at issue, and I admit 
that it is not easy to reconcile the idea of an English game cover 
with economic forestry, seeing that underwood has ceased to have 
any commercial value. At the same time, it is a fact that our 
present system of battue came from Germany, where forests are 
managed on the strictest principles of commerce. Close high 
wood is disliked by game, chiefly because of the scarcity of food 
there ; but cover shooting is such an artificial affair now that 
pheasants may be made to haunt whatever ground is best adapted 
for their artistic destruction. It is merely a question of where 
