Ix INTRODUCTION 



reign it increased to 103, 556 tons. To supply these rapidly 

 expanding requirements the stock of timber in the country 

 was feared to be inadequate. From 197,405, loads of timber 

 fit for the Navy in the New Forest in 1608, the stock sank 

 later to 19,873 in 1707 ; and in the royal forests in Glou- 

 cestershire a similar state of affairs obtained. At a meeting 

 of the Council of the Royal Society in November 1662, 

 Evelyn followed up his recent Sylva by suggesting a discourse 

 1 concerning planting his Majesty's Forest of Deane with 

 oake, now so much exhausted, of ye choicest ship-timber in 

 the world. ' This was before the days of steam or even of 

 macadamized roads, when we had to grow our own supplies 

 of food and Navy timber. True, oak for wainscoting and 

 the like had long been imported from the Continent; but if 

 we had been anything like dependent on foreign oak, the 

 Dutch War which shortly afterwards broke out would pro- 

 bably have cut off the same entirely from reaching our ports. 

 It is unnecessary to say much about this charming classic 

 of Forestry, of whose various excellences the reader can herein 

 judge for himself. Gracefully written in nervous English 

 and in a cultured style, ornately embellished according to the 

 then prevailing custom by apt quotations from the Latin 

 poets, it contains an enormous amount of information in the 

 shape of legends and of facts ascertained by travel, of observ- 

 ation, and of experience. No man of his time could possibly 

 have been better qualified than Evelyn for undertaking the 

 special duty laid upon him ; and he carried out his task in a 

 brilliant manner. Sylva soon ran into several editions. The 

 fourth edition appeared in the year of his death (1706) and 

 a fifth in 1729. From 1776 to 1812 other four editions 

 were published, with notes by Dr. A. Hunter of York, the 

 last of which served as the text for the celebrated forestry 

 article in the Quarterly Review for March, 1813. A later issue 

 of Hunter's editions appeared in 1825; but in 1827 ignorant 

 and wanton hands were with much bombastic language and 

 buffoonry laid on this great classic, when James Mitchell, an 

 agriculturist, published Dendrologia ; or a Treatise of Forest 

 Trees, with Evelyn s Silva, revised, corrected, and abridged by 

 a Professional Planter and Collector of practical Notes forty years. 

 Since then no other edition of Sylva has appeared until the 



