196 CONIFERS 



time we find ourselves wandering along some natural level, under the deep 

 and sublime shade of the heaving pine foliage, upheld high overhead by the 

 tall and massive columnar stems, which appear to form an endless colonnade ; 

 the ground dry as a floor beneath our footsteps, the very sound of which is 

 muffled by the thick deposition of decayed spines, with which the seasons 

 of more than one century have strewed it ; hardly conscious that the sun is 

 up, save from the fragrant resinous odour which its influence is exhaling, and 

 the continued hum of the clouds of insects that are dancing in its beams, over 

 the tops of the trees." 



This writer describes with graphic power the changes of scenery which 

 ensue, when the ground swells into hillocks, and the vast continuity of shade 

 is broken by the light which streams down on some single huge tree, and on 

 the purple heath-bells and tufts of ferns ; and how the silence is interrupted 

 by the proud movements of the troops of red-deer, or by the roar of the 

 cataract, whose white sheet of water dashes down the rock into some deep 

 ravine, shaking the very tallest of the Pine-trees, and bidding them quiver, 

 as by the touch of a giant hand. 



Extensive tracts of Highland Pine-forests have been thinned by the hand 

 of man ; and in some places, where once the trees grew in masses, they are 

 but few and scattered. Sometimes the Firs have been burned down in order 

 to extirpate the wolves ; sometimes because, in time of war, they afforded a 

 hiding-place to the enemy ; and many a lofty tree has been felled 



"To be the mast of some great ammiral." 



Hugh Miller, referring to the Forest of Corrybhalgan, says : — " It was 



but a shred of its former self, but the venerable trees still rose thick and tall 



in some of the more inaccessible hollows ; and it was interesting to mark, 



when they encroached on the open waste, how thoroughly they lost the 



ordinary character of the Scotch Fir, and how, sending out their short 



gnarled boles and immense branches two or three feet over the soil, they 



somewhat resembled, in their squat dense proportions and rounded contours, 



gigantic beehives." In other spots, masses of mossy land were covered with 



short stumps of trees, mingled with noble Pines, which have risen or are 



rising up from the 



" Fir-trees all around, 

 Aye dropping their hard fruit upon the ground." 



The Scotch Fir is probably a native of England as well as of Scotland. 

 Gerarde tells how the tree once grew in great plenty in Cheshire, Stafford- 

 shire, and Lancashire, " as is reported, before Noah's flood ; but being over- 

 flowed and overwhelmed, they have been found since in the mossie and 

 waterie moorish ground, very sound and fresh until this day, and so full of 

 a resinous substance that they burne like a torch or linke, and the inhabitants 

 of those countries doe call it Firre-woodde and Fire-woodde unto this day." 

 The bogs of Ireland prove, too, that the Fir was once abundant in that 

 country. 



A well-grown Scotch Fir is a beautiful tree, with its reddish-brown trunk 

 looking sometimes as if cut out of copper, and its spiry pyramidal head of 

 foliage. It has a common variety in which the branches spread out horizon- 



