FORMATION OF BOGS. oF 
in consequence of war or the exhaustion of the beasts of the 
chase, abandoned the narrow fields he had planted and the woods 
he had burned over, they speedily returned, by a succession of 
herbaceous, arborescent, and arboreal growths, to their original 
state. Even a single generation sufliced to restore them almost 
to their primitive luxuriance of forest vegetation.* The un- 
broken forests had attained to their maximum density and 
strength of growth, and, as the older trees decayed and fell, 
they were succeeded by new shoots or seedlings, so that from 
century to century no perceptible change seems to have occurred 
in the wood, except the slow, spontaneous succession of crops. 
This succession involved no interruption of growth, and but 
little break in the “boundless contiguity of shade ; ” for, in the 
husbandry of nature, there are no fallows. Trees fall singly, 
not by square roods, and the tall pine is hardly prostrate, before 
the light and heat, admitted to the ground by the removal of 
the dense crown of foliage which had shut them out, stimulate 
the germination of the seeds of broad-leaved trees that had 
lain, waiting this kindly influence, perhaps for centuries. 
formation of Bogs. 
Two natural causes, destructive in character, were, indeed, 
in operation in the primitive American forests, though, in 
the Northern colonies, at least, there were sufficient com- 
pensations; for we do not discover that any considerable 
but of the criginal colonies, and their dependencies in the territory of the pres- 
ent United States, and in Canada. It is, however, equally true of the Western 
prairies as of the Eastern forest land, that they had arrived at a state of equi- 
librium, though under very different conditions. 
* The great fire of Miramichi in 1825, probably the most extensive and 
terrific conflagration recorded in authentic history, spread its ravages over 
nearly six thousand square miles, chiefly of woodland, and was of such in- 
tensity that it seemed to consume the very soil itself. But so great are the 
recuperative powers of nature, that, in twenty-five years, the ground was 
thickly covered again with trees of fair dimensions, except where cultivation 
and pasturage kept down the forest growth. 
