A FOREST TOUR AMONG THE DUNES OF GASCONY. Salt 
brambles, which spring up immediately after the final felling has 
been made ; through these, the young oaks manage to force their 
way in two years, and they ultimately suppress them entirely. In 
this climate the oaks are not injured and checked by spring frosts, 
which occur so frequently, and do so much damage further north, 
We now entered the oldest part of the forest, aged from one 
hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty years, which has 
been subjected to uncontrolled selection fellings, and has, at the 
same time, been grazed over, chiefly by pigs and geese, which eat 
enormous quantities of acorns, as well as by other animals. Conse- 
quently, instead of finding trees of all ages on the ground, we saw 
a somewhat thin crop of old trees of great girth, which are 
branched and heavy topped without being tall, and are covered, in 
many instances, with climbing ferns, of, apparently, one of the 
species commonly found on the lower slopes of the north-western 
Himalaya. Under these large trees are seen dense thickets of 
bushes, between which the animals graze, and there are a few 
young oaks, of stunted and unhealthy appearance, which are not 
completely killed out by the cover, as they probably would be, 
under similar circumstances, in a more northerly latitude. For 
here the light is more intense, and they are, on this account, 
enabled to maintain themselves under cover of the larger trees ; 
but they cannot grow up, so that they do little or nothing towards 
the establishment of a regular gradation of age-classes. In fact 
the selection method cannot be successfully applied in the case of 
a pure forest composed of species of light cover, even when there 
is no grazing ; but when, as in this instance, animals are freely ad- 
mitted, the system fails completely. If this portion of the forest 
were to be simply closed at the present time, a large increase in 
the number of stuuted young oaks would undoubtedly follow, and 
some of these would push their way upwards in the more open 
places, but there would never be a properly constituted crop of 
sound and well-shaped trees of all ages on the ground. 
But, fortunately, an effective remedy for this state of things can 
easily be applied. In order to get a complete crop of young 
seedlings, grazing must be entirely stopped, and the dense under- 
growth of shrubs must be cleared. This latter process is found to 
act like a seed-felling, as it results in a marvellously dense 
growth of seedlings, which, a year or two after the bushes have 
been cut down, are sufficiently established to permit of the old 
crop being removed, and the forest is then completely regenerated, 
