THE HABITABLE EARTH ORIGINALLY WOODED. 149 
became the home of man. This we infer from the extensive 
vegetable remains—trunks, branches, roots, fruits, seeds, and 
leaves of trees—so often found in conjunction with works of 
primitive art, in the bogey soil of districts where no forests ap- 
pear to have existed within the eras through which written 
annals reach; from ancient historical records, which prove 
that large provinces, where the earth has long been wholly bare 
of trees, were clothed with vast and almost unbroken woods 
when first made known to Greek and Roman civilization ; * 
and from the state of much of North and of South America, 
as well as of many islands, when they were discovered and 
colonized by the European race.t 
These evidences are strengthened by observation of the na- 
tural economy of our own time; for, whenever a tract of 
country, once inhabited and cultivated by man, is abandoned by 
him and by domestic animals, and surrendered to the undis- 
turbed influences of spontaneous nature, its soil sooner or later 
clothes itself with herbaceous and arborescent plants, and, at 
no long interval, with a dense forest growth. Indeed, upon 
surfaces of a certain stability and not absolutely precipitous 
inclination, the special conditions required for the spontaneous 
propagation of trees may all be negatively expressed and re- 
duced to these three: exemption from defect or excess of 
* The recorded evidence in support of the proposition in the text has been 
collected by L. F. Alfred Maury, in his Histoire des grandes Foréis de la 
Gaule et de Vancienne France, and by Becquerel, in his important work, 
Des climats et de VInfluence quwexercent tes Sols boisés et non boisés, livre ii, 
chap. i. to iy. 
We may rank among historical evidences on this point, if not technically 
among historical records, old geographical names and terminations etymo- 
logically indicating forest or grove, which are so common in many parts of 
the Hastern Continent now entirely stripped of woods—such as, in Southern 
Europe, Breuil, Broglio, Brolio, Brolo; in Northern, Briihl, and the endings 
-dean, -den, -don, -ham, -holt, -horst, -hurst, -lund, -shaw, -shot, -skog, -skov, 
-wald, -weald, -wold, -wood. 
+ The island of Madeira, whose noble forests were devastated by fire not 
long after its colonization by European settlers, takes its name from the 
Portuguese word for wood. 
