NATURAL PRUNING OF FOREST TREES. 195 



relics of which may be seen for 20 or 30 years, standing high 

 over the young trees, with uplifted arms and blanched stems. " * 



In a very few years, the young 1 forest becomes a 

 thicket through which it is often difficult to pass, and 

 it is evident that out of the crowded mass of saplings 

 but a very small proportion can possibly survive to 

 form trees. 



Here another of the natural laws comes into force, 

 viz., the law of the "survival of the fittest," nowhere 

 to be seen to better advantage than in the struggle 

 for existence among the new growth in a great forest. 

 Everything that is weakly, stunted, or deformed, must 

 of necessity perish the most vigorous, and therefore 

 the fittest, alone surviving. The lower branches of the 

 trees of course, being bereft of light and air, always 

 die, decay, and drop from the trees of their own accord. 

 Thus Nature does her own pruning, she takes the 

 nurseling under her own special care and keeping, and 

 in due course of time lofty trees arise with stems clean 

 and straight as an arrow; and so the great primeval 

 forest once more resumes its sway over the land, and 

 age succeeds to age, during which the giant trees, 

 whose majestic size and appearance we have we fear 

 but feebly endeavoured to describe, tower above their 

 fellows and form the monarchs of the woods until the 

 next metamorphosis. 



Under no aspect, as we humbly believe, does Nature 

 appear more truly great far above anything that 

 human imagination can conceive than in this, her 

 marvellous capacity for evolving these vast cycles of 

 change, automatically succeeding each other through- 



K The Emigrant Sportsman in Canada, Experiences of an Old Settler, 

 by Mr. Rowan, 1876, pp. 270 271. 



