20 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
in age, and these woods do not. In the catalogue of the woods 
made in the year 1565, the expression, in the description of each 
wood, frequently occurs of “set” with oak or beech, as the case 
may be; and this seems to indicate that the crop was not wholly 
natural. However, as the woods were mostly enclosed, cultivated, 
cut, and farmed in rotation, there is nothing very extraordinary 
in their being, to some extent, planted as well, although it would 
seem that the self-sown crop was mainly relied upon. 
From what I have said, it will be clear that those who point to 
the New Forest as a specimen of “‘ primeval forest, untouched by 
the hand of man,” are sadly out of their reckoning. Itis alwaysa 
pity to destroy a charming and poetical vision, -but alas, the rude 
logic of facts is too much for this pretty theory. It is clear that 
the cultivation of the trees and woods of the forest was undertaken 
some time prior to the reign of Edward IV., say four hundred and 
fifty years ago. Now I suppose I shall not be very far wrong if 
I put the life of a beech at three hundred years; and though oaks, 
no doubt, live far longer, yet in the poor soil of the New Forest 
their lives do not attain to the average, except in a few favoured 
spots. It is our beeches that are the glory of the oldest woods, 
and it is very unlikely that any of those we now see are of older 
date than the records of the Exchequer in the time of Elizabeth, 
which I have quoted, at which period the forest was as much 
under a system of enclosing for planting as ever it has been 
since. In fact, there is not a single one of the beautiful old woods 
of the Forest that was not just as much a ‘Crown enclosure” 
as the most recent of the plantations made under the most 
recent Act. 
To those who are more familiar with the woods of the Forest 
than it is possible for visitors who have but a short time at their 
disposal to become, another fact points strongly to the presence of 
careful cultivation in the earlier days of the coppices. While the 
greater portion of these woods are of beech with a sprinkling of oak, 
precisely such an intermixture as we see springing up now wher- 
ever there is a bare portion of good land among the parent trees, by 
some means protected from cattle, yet there are several woods that 
are almost exclusively oak—one is absolutely so, and it is among 
the finest of the woods of that date. It is not difficult to account 
for the absence of oaks among the beeches, by the fact that these 
woods have been so often searched over by purveyors to the 
