182 WILD BIRDS 



oak trees with gnarled branches and short and thick 

 trunks ; the New Forest, in many of its " Walks," 

 gives the best examples of this wood the wood 

 beautiful, to-day not of much use, as we no longer 

 want crooked timber for our warships. 



The third wood is inhabited wholly by trees 

 no underwood which, growing close together, send 

 up long, clean, straight trunks. This is the wood 

 of use : the wood wherein great oaks spread, 

 each with a goodly plot of ground to itself, is the 

 wood of beauty. The wood of use is the wood of 

 competition. Nature throughout lives and thrives 

 on competition. Any English wood, hedgerow, 

 riverside, marsh, moor and meadow makes plain 

 this truth. Every kind of wild life has evolved 

 through competition. The road to perfection of 

 form is the road of competition. It is a highway 

 to adapt an image of Lowe's strewn with the 

 skeletons of dead species or varieties. 



Now about the oak wood for use there is this 

 extraordinary feature : man, adding competition to 

 competition, has for his own ends improved on 

 Nature in her particular province. In Nature the 

 oak wood left to itself does not grow its trees so 

 close as they are grown in the wood of man's inven- 

 tion. The trees take the New Forest form rather 

 than the tall, straight form aimed at in the State 

 woods in Germany ; where the acorns are sown in 

 rows close to each other, it is a race upward to air 

 and the sun by the young trees. Here, in the extra- 

 competition wood, is the best illustration of the 



