FORESTS IN GREAT BRITAIN. 307 
and other countries with which she maintains commercial rela- 
tions. 
Forests of Great Britain. 
The proportion of forest is very small in Great Britain, where, 
as I have said, on the one hand, a prodigious industrial activity 
requires a vast supply of ligneous material, but where, on the 
other, the abundance of coal, which furnishes a sufficiency of 
fuel, the facility of importation of timber from abroad, and the 
conditions of climate and surface combine to reduce the neces- 
sary quantity of woodland to its lowest expression. 
With the exception of Russia, Denmark, and parts of Ger- 
many, no European countries can so well dispense with the 
forests, in their capacity of conservative influences, as England 
and Ireland. Their insular position and latitude secure an 
abundance of atmospheric moisture ; the general inclination of 
surface is not such as to expose it to special injury from tor- 
rents, and it is probable that the most important climatic ac- 
tion exercised by the forest in these portions of the British em- 
pire, is in its character of a mechanical screen against the effects 
of wind. The due proportion of woodland in England and 
Jreland is, therefore, a question not of geographical, but almost 
purely of economical, expediency, to be decided by the com- 
parative direct pecuniary return from forest-growth, pasturage, 
and ploughland. 
Contrivances for economizing fuel came later into use in 
the British Islands than on the Continent. Before the intro- 
duction of a system of drainage, the soil, like the sky, was, in 
general, charged with humidity; its natural condition was un- 
favorable for the construction and maintenance of substantial 
common roads, and the transportation of so heavy a material 
as coal, by land, from the remote counties where alone it was 
mined in the Middle Ages, was costly and difficult. For all 
these reasons, the consumption of wood was large, and appre- 
hensions of the exhaustion of the forests were excited at an 
early period. Legislation there, as elsewhere, proved ineffectual 
