272 MAN AND NATURE. 



our own day we find in tropical countries vast regions 

 almost treeless, the balance is fully struck on other 

 continents by those wide tracts of close and continuous 

 forests into which no lumberer's axe has ever pene- 

 trated. Even in Europe, where intelligence and industry 

 have been most active in seeking fresh space for human 

 existence, we may affirm that one-half the total area is 

 covered with woods, either widely continuous, as in 

 Eussia, Sweden, Norway, and Poland ; or broken into 

 detached forests, as in Germany, Turkey, and France ; 

 or into smaller patches of timber, as in our own island. 



A considerable part of Mr. Marsh's volume is occu- 

 pied with this topic one most natural and reasonable 

 to an American writer. On the North American con- 

 tinent the vast regions east of the Mississippi, stretch- 

 ing northwards through Canada into the boundless 

 solitudes of the Hudson's Bay Territory, are still 

 covered with forests which set at defiance all common 

 measurements of space. The devastation of a pine- 

 forest by fire will often give to the traveller a more 

 vivid perception of extent than whole days of passage 

 through them. We ourselves have seen, in the wide 

 regions of the Upper Ottowa, an area of nearly sixty 

 miles in length and ten or fifteen miles in width, which 

 had been thus devastated by a single fire carried by 

 an impetuous wind over this long line of destruction. 

 Such a wilderness of gaunt perpendicular trunks, naked 

 of all branches and blackly charred, shows the depth 

 and density of a forest under an aspect never to be 

 forgotten. 



America, in fact, is the country of the world where 



