THE DEVELOPMENT OF 

 BRITISH FORESTRY 



CHAPTER I 



SOME NATIONAL ASPECTS OF FORESTRY 



So far as we can learn from history and reason by analogy, 

 the entire land surface of the globe, with certain excep- 

 tions, was originally covered with forest growth. These 

 exceptions were, without going too closely into details, 

 the arctic and antarctic circles, land lying above certain 

 elevations on mountains and tablelands, and territories 

 parched and dried up by heat and drought during the 

 greater part of the year. Within the frigid zones, and at 

 high elevations, insufficient warmth ; within the torrid 

 zones, insufficient moisture, are the two main factors re- 

 spectively in accounting for the absence of forests, and in 

 one guise or another these factors will be found responsible 

 for the more limited failure of timber trees elsewhere. 

 But while it appears to be a general law of nature that 

 forests shall be the ultimate stage in the various evolutions 

 of vegetative types, it is by no means certain that they 

 have existed in their ordinary form as timber forest under 

 every combination of climate, surface, and situation which 

 may be found throughout the globe. In tracts of country 

 with cold and dry winters, or hot and dry summers, many 

 areas may be found which either do not appear to have 

 carried more than a scanty forest growth at any time, or 

 Avhich only exhibit a stunted form of it usually known as 



A 



