FORMATION OF BOGS. 27 



nearly balanced and compensated each other. At the com- 

 mencement of the seventeenth century, the soil, with insignifi- 

 cant exceptions, was covered with forests ; * and whenever the 

 Indian, in consequence of war or the exliaustion of the beasts of 

 the chase, abandoned the narrow fields he had planted and the 

 woods he had burned over, they speedily returned, by a succes- 

 sion of herbaceous, arborescent and arboreal growths, to their 

 original state. Even a single generation sufficed to restore them] 

 alm'^st to their j)rimitive luxuriance of forest vegetation.-}* The 

 unbroken forests had attained to their maximum density and 

 strength of growth, and, as the older trees decayed and fell, they 

 were succeeded by new shoots or seedlings, so that from century 

 to century no perceptible change seems to have occurred in the 

 wood, except the slow, spontaneous succession of crops. This 

 succession involved no interruption of growth, and but Httle 

 break in the " boundless contiguity of shade "; for in the hus- 

 bandry of nature there are no fallows. Trees fall singly, not by 

 square roods, and the tall pine is hardly prostrate, before the hght 

 and heat, admitted to the ground by the removal of the dense 

 crown of f oUage which had shut them out, stimulate the germi- 

 nation of the seeds of broad-leaved trees that had lain, waiting 

 this kindly influence, perhaps for centuries. 



Formation of Bog 8.% 



Two natural causes, destructive in character, were, indeed, in 

 operation in the primitive American forests, though, in the 



* I do not here speak of the vast prairie region of the Mississippi valley, 

 which can not properly be said ever to have been a field of British coloniza- 

 tion ; but of the original colonies and their dependencies in the territory of 

 the present United States and in Canada. It is, however, equally true of the 

 Western prairies as of the Eastern forest land, that they had arrived at a state 

 of equilibrium, though under very different conditions. 



f The great fire of Mtramichi in 1825, probably the most extensive and ter- 

 rific conflagration recorded in authentic history, spread its ravages over nearly! 

 six thousand square miles, chiefly of woodland, and was of such intensity that) 

 it seemed to consume the very soil itself. But so great are the recuperative 

 powers of nature, that, in twenty-five years, the ground was thickly covered 

 again with trees of fair dimensions, except where cultivation and pasturage | 

 kept down the forest growth. 



X The English nomenclature of this geographical feature does not seem wel] 



