IMPROVEMENT FELLINGS. 489 



seedlings could not penetrate ; and if some seedlings did succeed 

 in sending down their roots deep enough to get a hold of the soil, 

 they were either crushed under the hoofs of the animals or browsed 

 down or broken, and thus kept back year after year, with the result 

 that they have now become permanently stunted and mis-shapen, 

 or at least unhealthy and unsound. When the grass dried up, 

 trees in leaf, especially those just bringing out their new foliage, 

 were ruthlessly lopped, large boughs being cut off for a few miser- 

 able mouthfuls of green fodder. 



(d) Wandering cultivation. As much as half, if not more, of 

 the aggregate area of our forests has been under some sort of cul- 

 tivation within the last two centuries. The cultivation was mostly 

 of the kind described in the last para, on page 24. Where there 

 was some semblance of settled tillage, the soil was still left 

 full of stools and sucker -producing roots, which ultimately caused 

 the fields to be abandoned and become covered with forest 

 growth of a more or less inferior kind. If the soil was naturally a 

 poor one, being never manured, it could bear crops for only a 

 few years and had then to be given up to lie fallow for a long 

 period of years. In this rude style of cultivation many large trees 

 were allowed to stand in the middle of the fields, but were pollarded 

 or heavily lopped to prevent them from damaging the crops. Such 

 trees, models of beauty perhaps for the artist, but eye-sores to the 

 forester, still cumber the ground over hundreds of thousands of 

 acres of scrub, and often also of a better class of forest. Even 

 where the cultivation had been of a settled type, war, rapine, severe 

 visitations of cholera, small pox, &c., or the death of a local cele- 

 brity led to entire villages being abandoned and becoming perma- 

 nent wastes. 



The result of all these and other causes of destruction or disorder, 

 working continuously through generations and centuries, has been 

 that most of our forests, besides being so extremely irregular and 

 often insufficiently stocked, contain such large quantities of un- 

 sound or mis-shapen or unhealthy material, and, in many cases, also 

 an inadequate proportion of valuable and even marketable species. 

 In some, advance growth is abundant and renders their restoration 

 and improvement easy ; in others, it occurs only in patches few and 

 far between or consists of sparsely scattered seedlings or clumps of 

 stool-shoots, the soil in the intervals being too hard and too much 

 under the dominion of grass and masterful low shrubby growth to 

 give any chance for the spontaneous appearance of reproduction 

 within a reasonable time ; while between these two extremes there 



