S BRITISH K<>KKST TK 



end of the last, and the beginning of the present century, 

 although fortunately others, such as those of Abernethy, 

 Athole, Duthal, Braemar, and Invercauld, escaped with 

 somewhat more rational treatment. Unfenced and unpro- 

 tected, the natural reproduction from seed could not have 

 any fair chance of outgrowing the damage done by cattle 

 and sheep browsing on the young seedlings and shoots, and 

 in this mutilated condition the light-loving pine would easily 

 be choked and killed by rank casual growth of heather, 

 heath, broom, and furze. To these historically authenticated 

 clearances of the natural forests there must also be added 

 the unrecorded enormous destruction of the aboriginal 

 woodlands from conflagrations and fires intentionally kindled 

 or accidentally caused, the vast extent of which cannot now 

 be estimated. Most of the pine stems found in mosses 

 exhibit signs of fire. As the pine is unable to reproduce 

 itself by suckers, or coppice shoots, or from dormant buds 

 along the stem, the destruction of these forests practically 

 put an end to forest growth in the hilly tracts, and gave 

 up the soil a prey to heath, and heather, and other 

 lowlier forms of vegetation, without any possibility of 

 natural reproduction of pine growth. Ireland, too, shows 

 a similar record, the colonization schemes (plantations] 

 of James I., Charles I., and Cromwell in the seventeenth 

 century having given a great impetus to the work of timber 

 clearance all throughout Ulster, Connaught, Leinster, and 

 Munster. 



That this work of destruction could without climatic and 

 economic disaster be permitted to a much greater degree in 

 (ireat Hritain and Ireland than on the Continent was, and 

 is, due mainly to our insular position with its moist and 

 comparatively equable climate, and to the enormous 

 supplies of coal, mineralised forest produce, which have 

 been our heritage. What we owe in Uritain to our forests 



