48 THE MODERN PERIOD. 



Where circumstances are favourable to their progress, forest fires 

 may extend over great areas. The great fire which occurred in 

 1825, in the neighbourhood of the Miramichi River, in New Brunswick, 

 devastated a region 100 miles in length and 50 miles in breadth. 

 One hundred and sixty persons, and more than 800 cattle, besides 

 innumerable wild animals, are said to have perished m this confla- 

 gration. In this case, a remarkably dry summer, a light soil easily 

 affected by drought, and a forest composed of full-grown pine trees, 

 concurred, with other causes, in producing a conflagration of unusual 

 extent. 



When the fire has passed through a portion of forest, if this consist 

 principally of hardwood trees, they are usually merely scorched, — 

 to such a degree, however, as in most cases to cause their death ; 

 some trees, such as the birches, probably from the more inflammable 

 nature of their outer bark, being more easily killed than others. 

 Where the woods consist of softwood or coniferous trees, the fire 

 often leaves nothing but bare trunks and branches, or at most a little 

 foliage, scorched to a rusty-brown colour. In either case, a vast 

 quantity of wood remains unconsumed, and soon becomes sufficiently 

 dry to furnish food for a new conflagration ; so that the same portion 

 of forest is liable to be repeatedly burned, until it becomes a bare and 

 desolate " barren," with only a few charred and wasted trunks towering 

 above the blackened surface. This has been the fate of large districts 

 in Nova Scotia and the neighbouring colonies ; and as these burned 

 tracts could not be immediately occupied for agricultural purposes, 

 and are diminished in value by the loss of their timber, they have 

 been left to the unaided efforts of nature to restore their original 

 verdure. Before proceeding to consider more particularly the mode 

 in which this restoration is effected, and the appearances by which it 

 is accompanied, I may quote, from a paper by the late Mr Titus 

 Smith of Halifax, a few statements on this subject, which, as the 

 results of long and careful observation, are entitled to much respect, 

 and may form the groundwork for the remarks which are to follow. 



" If an acre or two be cut down in the midst of a forest, and then 

 neglected, it will soon be occupied by a growth similar to that which 

 was cut down; but when all the timber on tracts of great size is 

 killed by fires, except certain parts of swamps, a very different 

 growth springs up ; at first a great number of herbs and shrubs, 

 which did not grow on the land when covered by living wood. The 

 turfy coat, filled with the decaying fibres of the roots of the trees 

 and plants of the forest, now all killed by the fire, becomes a kind of 

 hot-bed, and seeds which had lain dormant for centuries, spring up 



