298 SMALL FOREST PLANTS. 
that of furnishing a slender pasturage to cattle allowed to 
roam in the woods; and even this small advantage is far more 
than compensated by the mischief done to the young trees by 
browsing animals, Upon the whole, the importance of this! 
class of vegetables, as physic or as food, is not such as to fur- 
nish a very telling popular argument for the conservation of the 
forest as a necessary means of their perpetuation. More potent 
remedial agents may supply their place in the materia medica, 
and an acre of grass-land yields more nutriment for cattle than 
a range of a hundred acres of forest. But he whose sympathies 
with nature have taught him to feel that there is a fellowship 
between all God’s creatures; to love the brilliant ore better 
than the dull ingot, iodic silver and crystallized red copper 
better than the shillings and the pennies forged from them by 
the coiner’s cunning; a venerable oak-tree than the brandy-cask 
whose staves are split out from its heart-wood ; a bed of ane- 
mones, hepaticas, or wood violets than the leeks and onions 
which he may grow on the soil they have enriched and in the 
air they made fragrant—he who has enjoyed that special train- 
ing of the heart and intellect which can be acquired only in the 
unviolated sanctuaries of nature, “where man is distant, but 
God is near”—will not rashly assert his right to extirpate a 
tribe of harmless vegetables, barely because their products 
neither tickle his palate nor fill his pocket; and his regret at 
the dwindling area of the forest solitude will be augmented by 
the reflection that the nurselings of the woodland perish with 
the pines, the oaks, and the beeches that sheltered them.* 
Although, as I have said in a former chapter, birds do not 
frequent the deeper recesses of the wood, yet a very large pro- 
* Quaint old Valvasor had observed the subduing influence of nature’s soli- 
tudes. In describing the lonely Canker-Thal, which, though rocky, was in 
his time well wooded with “ fir, larches, beeches and other trees,’ he says: 
‘“ Gladsomeness and beauty, which dwell in many valleys, may not be looked 
for there. The journey through it is cheerless, melancholy, wearisome, and 
serveth to temper and mortify over-joyousness of thought. ... In sum it is 
a very desert, wherein the wildness of human pride doth grow tame.” —Wkre 
der Crain, i., p. 186, b. 
