PRIMITIVE TREATMENT OF FORESTS. ?i 



prietor, for which a consideration had been given. And 

 the general practice of burning the veld, which is there 

 followed whether applied to grass, or to other herbage 

 and bush is the same in principle ; but what is now 

 under consideration is the application of it to forests and 

 trees. The practice may be said to be universal. 



' When multiplying, man had filled the open grounds 

 along the margin of the rivers/ says Marsh, in his valuable 

 volume entitled The Earth as Modified by Hitman Action, 

 'and the lakes, and the sea, and sufficiently peopled the 

 natural meadows and savannahs of the interior, where 

 such existed, he could find room for expansion and further 

 growth only by the removal of a portion of the forest that 

 hemmed him in. The destruction of the woods, then, was 

 man's first geographical conquest, his first violation of the 

 harmonies of inanimate nature. Primitive man had little 

 occasion to fell trees for fuel, or for the construction of 

 dwellings, boats, and the implements of his rude agricul- 

 ture and handicrafts ; windfalls would furnish a thin 

 population with a sufficient supply of such material, and 

 if occasionally a growing tree was cut, the injury to the 

 forest would be too insignificant to be at all appreciable. 

 The accidental escape and spread of fire, or possibly the 

 combustion of forests by lightning [?] must have first 

 suggested the advantages to be derived from the removal 

 of too abundant and extensive woods, and, at the same 

 time, have pointed out a means whereby a large tract of 

 surface could readily be cleared of much of this natural 

 encumbrance. As soon as agriculture had commenced at 

 all, it would be observed that the growth of cultivated 

 plants, as well as of many species of wild vegetation, was 

 particularly rapid and luxuriant on soils which had been 

 burned over, and thus a new stimulus would be given to 

 the practice of destroying the woods by fire, as a means of 

 both extending the open grounds, and making the agri- 

 culture of a yet more productive sort. After a few 

 harvests had exhausted the first rank fertility of the virgin 

 mould, or when weeds and briars and the sprouting roots 



