FIRST REMOVAL OF THE FOREST. 345 
Primitive man had little occasion to fell trees for fuel, or for 
the construction of dwellings, boats, and the implements of his 
rude agriculture and handicrafts. Windfalls would furnish a 
thin population with a sufficient supply of such material, and 
if occasionally a growing tree was cut, the injury to the forest 
would be too insignificant to be at all appreciable. 
The accidental escape and spread of fire, or, possibly, the 
combustion of forests by lightning, must have first suggested 
the advantages to be derived from the removal of too abun- 
dant and extensive woods, and, at the same time, have pointed 
out a means by which a large tract of surface could readily be 
cleared of much of this natural incumbrance. As soon as agri- 
culture had commenced at all, it would be observed that the 
growth of cultivated plants, as well as of many species of wild 
vegetation, was particularly rapid and luxuriant on soils which 
had been burned over, and thus a new stimulus would be 
given to the practice of destroying the woods by fire, as a 
means of both extending the open grounds, and making the 
acquisition of a yet more productive soil. After a few har- 
vests had exhausted the first rank fertility of the virgin mould, 
or when weeds and briers and the sprouting roots of the trees 
had begun to choke the crops of the half-subdued soil, the 
ground would be abandoned for new fields won from the forest 
by the same means, and the deserted plain or hillock would 
soon clothe itself anew with shrubs and trees, to be again sub- 
jected to the same destructive process, and again surrendered 
to the restorative powers of vegetable nature.* This rude 
* In many parts of the North American States, the first white settlers 
found extensive tracts of thin woods, of a very park-like character, called 
‘** oak-openings,” from the predominance of different species of that tree upon 
them. These were the semi-artificial pasture-grounds of the Indians, brought 
into that state, and so kept, by partial clearing, and by the annual burning of 
the grass. The object of this operation was to attract the deer to the fresh 
herbage which sprang up after the fire. The oaks bore the annual scorching 
at least for a certain time; but if it had been indefinitely continued, they 
would very probably have been destroyed at last. The soil would have then been 
much in the prairie condition, and would have needed nothing but grazing for 
