i8 BRITISH FOREST TREES 



which the most suitable of the other species would occur 

 merely as subordinate clumps, or groups, or patches, or 

 individuals, in situations for which they were either naturally 

 better adapted than the ruling species, or to which the 

 seed had been carried by some such fortuitous agency as 

 birds, animals, c. There would, too, always be a sort of 

 debatable land between the domain of each, where the 

 two neighbouring kinds of ruling species existed in more 

 or less constant warfare and rivalry, each striving to gain an 

 advantage over the other as far as possible; the more insinuat- 

 ing and hardy slowly, perhaps, but surely gaining advantages 

 until it reached the limits of its proving more suitable and 

 hardy than its rival. Nature would ascribe to each of the 

 different forest trees the soils and situations best suited for it, 

 and for which it was best suited. 



Before man commenced to interfere with the work of 

 nature by felling trees prematurely, and clearing, or sowing, 

 or planting, as it pleased him, Scotland had its vastly pre- 

 dominating growth of Scots pine, and scantier growth of 

 birch and rowan on the mountains ; oaks, ashes, Scots elms, 

 alders, and willows, together with the less important hazel, 

 holly, and yew, were abundant on the better soils through- 

 out all Scotland and northern England ; central and southern 

 England bore their enormous stretches of beech growth 

 forming dense and more or less pure forests on the limy and 

 chalky soils of the midland counties, where also a goodly 

 growth of oak flourished on the richer alluvial tracts and 

 lower uplands, used principally as coverts for innumerable 

 wild boar, roe, and red deer, and constituting the grazing 

 grounds into which large herds of swine were driven for 

 pannage and mast. Norway and Sweden had their pine 

 and spruce forests, whilst hundreds of thousands of acres of 



" Mr. Evelyn remarks that every forest in which oak and beech grow 

 promiscuously will, in a course of ages, become entirely beechen." 



