BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ARBORICULTURE OF THE NEW FOREST. 39 
and are hastening to their end ; every gale leaves gap after gap in 
their ranks; in all of the less recent of these gaps may be seen 
hundreds of the young saplings and scions of the ancient trees 
struggling up only to be gnawed down and destroyed or injured 
by the cattle, except where kindly thickets of blackthorn here 
and there save them from the injury, and show, as if in mockery, 
what a wealth of reproduction is in the soil if the simplest pro- 
tection be afforded, and Nature left to do her own work with a 
free hand. This is prohibited by a well-meant but ill-drawn Act. 
As things stand now, the old woods of the Forest, the glory of the 
greatest of our national estates, are being slowly destroyed by Act 
of Parliament! Nothing is more certain to the observant forester 
than that these woods, under the present system, are gradually 
diminishing, and that a second generation of trees will see them, 
from having become a mere remnant of their former selves, 
disappear altogether; and so the best land in the Forest will 
become denuded entirely of trees, and the property will be to 
posterity but a shadow of what we now enjoy, owing to the care 
and better management of our ancestors. 
Arboriculture may for the present be said to be dead in the 
chief national forest. It is practically restricted to the thinning 
of a certain number of plantations of no great age. From these, 
revenue has to be obtained to keep up the roads, drains, bridges, 
etc., over a vast tract of unremunerative land, and as long as they 
can perform the task, the country enjoys its vast park free of cost. 
Planting is restricted to replenishing the damage wrought by 
occasional fires or similar disasters. A certain amount of planting 
of single trees in the open spaces of the older woods has been 
done, in the teeth of strenuous opposition from the commoners or 
their allies ; but the great size of the trees that had to be used, so 
that they might be safe from cattle, and the consequent expense 
and numerous failures, have proved this to be but a broken reed 
to rely upon to stem the rapid decay of old woods past a certain 
stage of growth. For the latter part of this century the managers 
of the Forest are forced to assume that position of lookers-on at 
decay and deterioration which they were so heavily blamed for 
voluntarily taking up during the first years thereof. In fact, by 
a curious turn of the wheel, the Forest has gone back about four 
hundred years, and is again under rules such as governed it from 
the days of the Red William to those in which a revival first took 
place, and planting or care of some kind was bestowed upon the 
