CONTINENTAL NOTES— FRANCE. I 57 



leads, too, to the settlement in your neighbourhood of wood- 

 working and wood-buying people. 



Although the Uniform method has many notable advantages 

 over Selection, the immense length of time needed for its intro- 

 duction, and the many difficulties experienced in the course of 

 the conversion from the irregular to the regular type of wood 

 (and most woods are irregular), make it impossible for ordinary 

 people. But may not M. Mer's plan be profitably followed here, 

 that is to say, a form of Selection worked on cultural rules but 

 with a guarantee against over-cutting in a fixed diameter repre- 

 senting maturity? I would, however, make the attempt to get 

 the crop into such a condition that stems of a size are more or 

 less together in masses, so as to avoid some of the drawbacks of 

 ordinary Selection. 



The fixing of the dimension to correspond to maturity would 

 be the biggest difficulty, but it is so important that it would be 

 worth some trouble. Except for this the difficulties would not 

 be great. 



22. Some Remarks on British Forest History. 



By II. G. Richardson. 



I.— THE MIDDLE AGES. 



No one has yet seriously attempted the history of British 

 woodlands. There exist historical accounts of several individual 

 forests, e.g. ¥\s\\tx''s Forest of Essex ; Turton's Forest of Pickering ; 

 Furley's Weald of Kent ; and some popular account of English 

 forests in general, of which the latest and best is that by 

 J. C. Cox, The Royal Forests of England, in " The Antiquary's 

 Books" series, while a list of works on Scottish forests is 

 given in the Transactions, xxvi. 29 ff. But all these books 

 are more largely concerned with forest law and the chase 

 than timber : for the most part the economic aspect of 

 woodlands, the aspect which, throughout history, has been 

 of the first importance, has been dealt with only in brief and 

 scamped chapters in treatises and reports concerned with the 

 science and art of growing and converting timber. Since the 

 writers and compilers of these latter works appear to have had 

 little of the equipment requisite for historical studies, it is not 

 strange that there should have grown up a history which, it 



