268 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINNAEUS 



Christmas trees, in Norway and Sweden they are pines. 

 We often read of richly timbered Denmark, and here 

 are some wind-tossed oaks of small size ; but in all this 

 region I have not seen a beech tree of respectable 

 girth. Jahns, speaking of the pre-historic ages, says, 

 1 In Denmark their division is marked even by the 

 vegetation. The stone age lies buried under the fir 

 tr-ees, the oak stratum conceals the bronzes, and the 

 iron age is covered by the birch and elders ' a capti- 

 vating idea, though I don't quite see the drift of it, or I 

 would begin to dig at once. The four sorts of trees 

 are all here closely side by side. It is one of those 

 deep German ideas that mean anything you please. 



Here is a pretty fiord near Veile, with bulrushes in 

 the foreground, set in undulating country covered with 

 golden broom, backed by beech-clothed hills ; but these are 

 woods, not forests. When people talk admiringly of the 

 beech forests of Denmark, it is more often Holstein they 

 are thinking of. Here is Fredericia on the belt of sea 

 dividing Jutland from Funen. The strait (a silver streak) 

 and a weed-fringed foreground stream winding among 

 the black peat-pits, give light to a pretty Danish picture. 

 The peat-pit is everybody's own private coal-cellar. Be- 

 yond another fiord, with a pretty hamlet on its border, 

 one sees Kolding with its high-placed ruined castle, of 

 which one battlemented tower remains solid, while all 

 the rest is gutted a mere shell. The canal now makes 

 the timber-station of more importance than the proud 

 castle, which stands all solitary but for the heavy 



