ANCIENT AND MODERN FORESTRY 69 



Looking back to the time of James I., when 

 the British Isles were but thinly peopled and little 

 cultivated, a rough idea can easily be formed of 

 the vastly greater extent of country then under 

 woodlands than is now the case. Most of the 

 Scottish hills north of the Forth and Clyde still 

 bore their natural covering of pine, which also 

 clothed large tracts here and there southwards 

 to the Yorkshire moors. All over the chalk 

 hills, from beyond the Cotswolds eastwards along 

 the Chiltern Hills and the ranges forming the 

 backbone of Gloucestershire, Hants, and Bucks, 

 the remnants of the beechwoods give indica- 

 tion of the fine growth with which the limy 

 soils must once have been densely covered. It is 

 to the oak forests, however, which once clothed 

 great tracts of loamy and clayey soils on the 

 uplands and in the valleys of all central and 

 southern England, and the milder valley tracts 

 from the Humber and Mersey northwards to the 

 pine tracts of the Scottish highlands, that Britain 

 in part owes her present exalted position among 

 the great nations of the earth. 



Recent suggestions that the waste lands and 

 barren moors of Scotland might now advantage- 



