290 SMALL FOREST PLANTS. 



and even tliis small advantage is far more tlian compensated by 

 tiie mischief done to the young trees by browsing animals. Upon 

 the whole, the importance of this class of vegetables, as physic or 

 as food, is not such as to furnish a very telling popular argument 

 for the conservation of the forest as a necessary means of their 

 perpetuation. More potent remedial agents may supply their 

 place in the materia medica, and an acre of grass-land yields 

 more nutriment for cattle than a range of a hundred acres of 

 forest. But he whose sympathies with nature have taught him 

 to feel that there is a fellowship between all God's creatures ;, to 

 love the brilliant ore better than the dull ingot, iodic silver and 

 crystallized red copper better than the shillings and the pennies 

 forged from them by the coiner's cunning ; a venerable oak-tree 

 than the brandy-cask whose staves are split out from its heart- 

 wood ; a bed of anemones, hepaticas, or wood-violets than the 

 leeks and onions which he may grow on the soil they have en- 

 riched and in the air they made fragrant — he who has enjoyed 

 that special training of the heart and intellect which can be ac- 

 quired only in the unviolated sanctuaries of nature, " where man 

 is distant, but God is near " — ^will not rashly assert his right to 

 extirpate a tribe of harmless vegetables, barely because their prod- 

 ucts neither tickle his palate nor fill his pocket ;' and his regret 

 at the dwindling area of the forest solitude wiU be augmented by 

 the reflection that the nurselings of the woodland perish with the 

 pines, the oaks and the beeches that sheltered them.* 



Although, as I have said in a former chapter, bii'ds do not fre- 

 quent the deeper recesses of the wood, yet a very large propor- 

 tion of them build their nests in trees, and find, in their fohage 

 and branches, a secure retreat from the inclemencies of the seasons 

 and the pursuit of the reptiles and quadrupeds which prey upon 

 them. The borders of the forests are vocal with song ; and when 



* Quaint old Valvasor had observed the subduing influence of nature's soli- 

 tudes. In describing the lonely Canker-Thai, which, though rocky, was in 

 his time well wooded with "fir, larches, beeches and other trees," he says • 

 " Gladsomeness and beauty, which dwell in many valleys, may not be looked 

 for there. The journey through it is cheerless, melancholy, wearisome, and 



scrveth to temper and mortify over-joyousness of thought In sum it is 



a very desert, wherein the wildness of human pride doth grow tame," — Ehr6 

 der Grain, i., p. 136, b. 



