370 THE SCOTCH FIE, OR PINE. 



heat, soon vegetate in the open heath, and eventually 

 become trees. Some of the rooks, it is said, do even 

 more than this ; they not only convey the cones to some 

 lonely place, but take advantage of the workings of an 

 underground quadruped as black as themselves, and may 

 be sometimes seen actively employed in burying the cones 

 in molehills. 



"It is curious to observe," says Sir T. D. Lauder in 

 another place, " haw the work of renovation goes on in a 

 Pine-forest. The young seedlings come up as thick as 

 they do in the nurseryman's seedbeds ; and in the same 

 relative degree of thickness do they continue to grow till 

 they are old enough to be cut down. The competition 

 which takes place between the adjacent individual plants 

 creates a rivalry that increases their upward growth, whilst 

 the exclusion of the air prevents the formation of lateral 

 branches, or destroys them after they are formed. Thus 

 Nature produces by far the most valuable timber ; for it 

 is tall, straight, of uniform diameter throughout its whole 

 length, and free from knots ; all which qualities combine 

 to render it fit for spars, which fetch double or treble the 

 sum per foot that other trees do. The large and spreading 

 trees are on the outskirts of the masses, and straggle here 

 and there in groups or single trees." 



How little the hand of man has had to do at any period, 

 except within the last fifty years, in planting the Pine 

 in Scotland, appears from the numerous extensive tracts 

 which were once crowded forests, but have been dis- 

 mantled by human agency. Almost every district of the 

 Highlands bears the trace of the vast forest with which, at 

 no very distant period, the hills and heaths were covered ; 

 some indeed have decayed with age, but large tracts were 

 purposely destroyed in the latter end of the sixteenth and 

 beginning of the seventeenth centuries. On the south 

 side of Ben Nevis a large Pine-forest, which extended from 

 the western braes of Lochaber to the black water and 

 mosses of Eanach, was burned to expel the wolves. In 



