330 ANCIENT 



That latter fact is of some importance with re- 

 gard to the rot in the planted timber ; for, if it 

 could not be shown that " the last race " were as 

 sound and good in their quality as any of the 

 others, the nurseryman might meet the strictures 

 of the observer of nature, by charging the rot on 

 the trees and not on the mode of treatment, by 

 saying that the weakening of the timber is one of 

 the symptoms of the fading of native trees from 

 the British soil. But the facts render such a plea 

 nugatory. 



As little can it be said that the forests perished 

 because the trees became barren ceased to bear 

 fruit after their kinds ; for the remains of fruit, in 

 all cases in which they are of such an imperish- 

 able nature as that they can last in the cold and 

 humid bog, are as well preserved as the trees. 

 Nut- shells are in some bogs, the only memorials 

 of the hazle coppices; and they are found in 

 thousands in places where there is not now a na- 

 tive hazle bud for twenty miles in any direction, 

 although there is abundance of room which has 

 never been disturbed by cultivation. At one 

 place, in the parish of Monikie, in Forfarshire, 

 there stands a lonely fortalice, the Hynd Castle, 

 upon a mound of its ruins, and surrounded, or 

 nearly so, by a peat bog, which, from the immense 

 number of nutshells in it, must once have been 

 a hazle copse, or rather it has been a wood with 

 hazle underwood the demesne, or part of the 

 fortalice, perhaps, for there are the remains of 

 large forest trees in it ; and from the remains of 

 vegetation, the form of the surface, the keenness 

 of the air, and the purity of the water, there is 

 great reason to believe that it has once been a 



