22 SYLVICULTURE. 



therefore really needing to be kept in fairly close canopy. It 

 thus led to habitual overthinning tending to stimulate excessive 

 branch formation at the expense of a long and clean stem. And 

 as the market for oak-bark and small coppice-wood is now very 

 poor compared with what it used to be, many of the old coppices, 

 with or without standards, have been or are in course of being 

 converted into highwoods. But it is important to note at the 

 outset that the tendency to overthin greatly, which is now 

 usually admitted to be one of the great faults in British Arbori- 

 culture, had its origin in 1543, when the Statute of Woods 

 ordained for England the coppice-with-standards system of 

 growing timber-trees, arid that this system was continuously 

 developed and enforced by subsequent Acts of Parliament. 



During the most of this second period, from 1482 right up 

 to about 100 years ago, there was always a dearth of timber, and 

 especially of oak, owing to the constantly growing demands for 

 ship-building and other constructive purposes. But when 

 timber-importation began on a large scale early in the nineteenth 

 century, after Britain had obtained the command of the seas, less 

 attention than hitherto was paid to home forestry, which began 

 to decline rapidly as improved steam communications developed 

 by land and water. The growing neglect became greater when 

 the import duty was taken off colonial timber in 1846 ; and 

 when the import duty was also removed from all foreign timber 

 in 1866, thereby cheapening the price of the fine clean-grown 

 stems and excellent sawn wood arriving in apparently inexhaust- 

 ible abundance, the value of home-grown wood fell so low that 

 timber - growing, for centuries an important rural industry, 

 became unprofitable, and many of the existing woodlands came 

 to be practically treated mainly as game coverts and ornamental 

 parts of the large landed estates. The removal of the foreign 

 import duty in 1866 virtually gave the death-blow to the old 

 national system of Arboriculture that sprang up in England from 

 1543 onwards, and then extended to Scotland, and which had 



