334 FOREST FUENISHES NO FOOD FOE MAN. 



The Forest does not furnish Food for Mem. 



In a region absolutely covered with trees, liuman life could not 

 long be sustained, for want of animal and vegetable food. The 

 depths of the forest seldom f m*nish either bulb or fruit suited to 

 the nourishment of man ; and the fowls and beasts on which he 

 feeds are scarcely seen except upon the margin of the wood, for 

 here only grow the shrubs and grasses, and here only are found 

 the seeds and insects, which form the sustenance of the non- 

 carnivorous birds and quadrupeds.* 



* Clave, as well as many earlier writers, supposes that primitive man de- 

 rived his nutriment from the spontaneous productions of the wood, " It is 

 to the forests," says he, "that man was first indebted for the means of sub- 

 sistence. Exposed alone, without defence, to the rigor of the seasons, as well 

 as to the attacks of animals stronger and swifter than himself, he found in 

 them his first shelter, drew from them his first weapons. In the first period 

 of humanity, they provided for all his wants : they furnished him wood for 

 warmth, fruits for food, garments to cover his nakedness, arms for his de- 

 fence." — Etudes sur VJEconomie Forestiere, p. 13. 



But the history of savage life, as far as it is known to us, presents man in 

 that condition as inhabiting only the borders of the forest and the open 

 grounds that skirt the waters and the woods, and as finding only there the 

 aliments which make up his daily bread. The villages of the North American 

 Indians were upon the shores of rivers and lakes, and their weapons and other 

 relics are found only in the narrow open grounds which they had burned over 

 and cultivated, or in the margin of the woods around their hamlets. 



Except upon the banks of rivers or of lakes, the woods of the interior of 

 North America, far from the habitations of man, are almost destitute of ani- 

 mal life. Dr. Newberry, describing the vast forests of the yellow pine of the 

 "West, Piniis fonder osa, remarks : "In the arid and desert regions of the in- 

 terior basin, we made whole days' marches in forests of yellow pine, of which 

 neither the monotony was broken by other forms of vegetation, nor its still- 

 ness by the flutter of a bird or the hum of an insect." — Pacific Railroad Be- 

 pori, vol. vi., 1857. Dr. Newberry's Report on Botany, p. 37. 



Cheadle and Milton's North-ioest Passage confirms these statements. Val- 

 vasor says, in a paragraph already quoted, "In my many journeys through 

 this valley, I did never have sight of so much as a single bird." 



The wild fruit and nut trees, the Canada plum, the cherry, the many spe- 

 cies of walnut, the butternut, the hazel, yield very little, frequently nothing, 

 so long as they grow in the woods ; and it is only when the trees around them 

 are cut down, or when they grow in pastures, that they become productive. 

 The berries, too — the strawberry, the blackberry, the raspberry, the whortle- 

 berry — scarcely bear fruit at all except in cleared ground. 



The rank forests of the tropics are as unproductive of human aliment as the 

 less luxuriant woods of the temperate zone. In Strain's unfortunate cxpedi 



