164 THE NEW FOREST 



crows and other vermin/' See Report of Com- 

 missioners of 1789. 



Apparently, the dense plantations thus formed 

 were never thinned, but grew up on the principle 

 of " the survival of the fittest." Whether these 

 are good principles or bad ones must be decided 

 by the pundits of the modern science of Forestry. 

 But the result was undeniable. When the French 

 professors of forestry from the school at Nancy, 

 headed by M. Boffre, the chief of that institution, 

 visited the forests and woodlands of England in 

 1885, they left it on record that nowhere in 

 Europe had they found pure oak woods with a 

 larger quantity of cubic feet to the acre than in 

 these old William III plantations in the New 

 Forest. 



What is more, up to that date, when the 

 trees were well under two hundred years old, 

 the majority of them were sound timber, though 

 some were showing signs of old age an indica- 

 tion of the brief limit of life to be enjoyed by our 

 best timber trees, in the very moderate soil and 

 bad exposure of most of the New Forest woods. 



And sure enough, in the thirty years during 

 which I have occasionally thinned those woods, 

 the quality of the timber has been steadily de- 

 teriorating until, in 1913, it was worth but little 

 more than half the price it fetched in 1883. 



