54 THE NEW FORESTRY. 



SECTION III. TIMBER-TREES OF THE OLDER BRITISH 

 WOODS. 



It must not be supposed from what has been said that the 

 timber produced in Britain has always been of the description 

 produced by the cultural methods of Brown and his prede- 

 cessors. There are good reasons for supposing that before 

 the empirical system of forestry in vogue during the last 

 century began, our forests were, to a large extent, of natural 

 growth, and that much of the best timber which was supplied 

 for the navy and other purposes came from such forests. 

 A reference to the navy estimates in " Haydn's Dictionary of 

 Dates," from the beginning of the eighteenth to well on in the 

 nineteenth century, will show that the demand for timber for 

 ships must have gone up by leaps and bounds, and during that 

 period the woods of England must have been ransacked for 

 timber of large size. That this was the case is proved also by 

 the records of private estates a long way from the sea, and 

 which show that the timber was simply felled and squared by 

 the axe in the wood and hauled by horses to its destination. 

 It was this demand which has led writers on forestry to dwell 

 so much on the wants of the navy when timber was the 

 material used in ship-building, and the demand for which only 

 fell off with the advent of iron and the use of foreign timber. 

 According to Marshall, 1785, a gentleman of leisure who tra- 

 velled much in England in search of information on the subject 

 of planting, great inroads had been made in the forests of this 

 country in his time, but much was still left. With the decline 

 of the demand for ship timber, however, arose the demand for 

 oak and fir for railway carriages, waggons, and sleepers, and we 

 believe that the demand for railway material of that description 

 has, during the last fifty years, exceeded the demand for the 

 navy at the time referred to above, with the result that our 

 stock of home-grown big timber is now approaching the 

 vanishing point. The main timbers of railway carriages are 

 still, by preference, made of English oak of good size, and, as 

 only the very straightest and soundest trees are used, and only 

 the best portions of these, the consumption of oak, in the shape 

 of railway material alone, may be imagined when it is added 

 that some of our great companies will now own from one to 

 nearly two hundred thousand carriages and waggons. Rail- 

 ways, of course, use a great variety of other kinds of timber ; 

 but oak for carriages and Scotch fir for sleepers for the 



