306 WOODLAND IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. 
Britain especially the demand of the various industries which 
depend on wood as a material, or on mechanical power derived 
from heat, are very great. Coal and peat serve as a combustible 
instead of wood in them all, and England imports an immense 
quantity of timber from her foreign possessions. J ortunately, 
the character of soil, surface, and climate renders the forest of 
less importance as a geographical agent in these northern re- 
gions than in Spain and Portugal, where all physical conditions 
concur to make a large extent of forest an almost indispensable 
means of industrial progress and social advancement. 
Rentzsch, in fact, ascribes the political decadence of Spain 
almost wholly to the destruction of the forest. “Spain,” ob- 
serves he, “seemed destined by her position to hold dominion 
over the world, and this in fact she once possessed. But she has 
lost her political ascendancy, because, during the feeble adminis- 
tration of the successors of Philip II., her exhausted treasury 
could not furnish the means of creating new fleets, the destruc- 
tion of the woods having raised the price of timber above the 
means of the state.”* On the other hand, the same writer 
argues that the wealth and prosperity of modern England are 
in great part due to the supply of lumber, as well as of other 
material for ship-building, which she imports from her colonies 
* Der Wald, p. 63. Antonio Ponz (Viage de Espana, i., prélogo, p. lxiii.), 
says: ‘‘ Nor would this be so great an evil, were not some of them declaimers 
against trees, thereby proclaiming themselves, in some sort, enemies of the 
works of God, who gave us the leafy abode of Paradise to dwell in, where we 
should be even now sojourning, but for the first sin, which expelled us from 
ag 
I do not know at what period the two Castiles were bared of their woods, 
but the Spaniard’s proverbial ‘‘hatred of a tree” is of long standing. Her- 
rera combats this foolish prejudice; and Ponz, in the prologue to the ninth 
volume of his journey, says that many carried it so far as wantonly to destroy 
the shade and ornamental trees planted by the municipal authorities. ‘‘ Trees,” 
they contended, and still believe, ‘‘ breed birds, and birds eat up the grain.” 
Our author argues against the supposition of the ‘‘ breeding of birds by trees,”’ 
which, he says, is as absurd as to believe that an elm-tree can yield pears ; 
and he charitably suggests that the expression is, perhaps, a maniére de dire, 
a popular phrase, signifying simply that trees harbor birds, 
