CHAPTER II. 







ANCIENT FORESTS OF EUROPE. 



THE indications of its having been the case that, some 

 two thousand years ago the greater part of Europe was 

 covered with forests, are numerous and varied. And 

 from existing remains of these forests some idea may be 

 formed of what must then have been the condition of 

 Europe : in some regions, but not everywhere, one con- 

 tinuous dense mass of trees ; but more frequently exten- 

 sive stretches of forest, impenetrable to man and beast, 

 but varied with forest glades, the home of the beasts of 

 the forest, and inhabited by a savage people : so named, it 

 may be, from their living in the woods, ' wild men of the 

 woods' Silvagers, sauvages savages; a people cruel in 

 their revenge when molested by immigrants of greater 

 civilisation, and so cruel in retaliating on those forcibly 

 invading their dwelling-place injuries done to them or 

 imagined, that in the present day the term savage has 

 become a synonym for cruel; and it is applied to all uncivi- 

 lised nations, with an embodied idea that such is their 

 character, though deeds not less to be reprobated than any 

 of theirs have been perpetrated by individuals and nations, 

 the product of the civilisation of modern times, with all 

 the elevating influences which Christianity has yet exer- 

 cised upon Christendom. 



The existing forests of Germany, the Thuringerwald in 

 Gqtha, the Schwartz wald or Black Forest in Baden, the 

 Oderswald in Hesse, the Spessart, between Aschaffenburg 

 and Wurtzburg, and the forests in the Austrian Alps, are 

 all of them only fragmentary remains of the great Hircynian 

 Forest, which originally covered the greater part of Con- 



