384 DECREASE OF FORESTS. 



of endless change. Fragility and force, softness find strength, in all 

 degrees of aspects ; unerring uprightness, as of temple pillars, or 

 undivided wandering of feeble tendrils on the ground ; mighty resist- 

 ances of rigid arm and limb to the storms of ages, or wavings to and 

 fro with faintest pulse of summer streamlet. Roots cleaving the 

 strength of rock, or binding the transience of the sand ; crests bask- 

 ing in sunshine of the desert, or hiding by dripping spring and light- 

 less cave ; foliage for tossing in entangled fields beneath every wave 

 of ocean clothing with variegated, everlasting fibres, the peaks of 

 the trackless mountains, or ministering at cottage doors to every 

 gentlest passion and simplest joy of humanity." 



Considered in their physiological aspect, it is evident that the forests 

 have played, from the remotest ages of our planet, a pre-eminently 

 useful part, by absorbing the carbonic acid with which the atmosphere 

 was surcharged, fixing the carbon, and restoring to the air a quantity 

 of oxygen sufficient for the support of animal life, impossible or rudi- 

 mentary previous to their creation. And they still serve to maintain 

 the chemical equilibrium of the atmosphere, by incessantly refeeding 

 it with the oxygen which the respiration of animals and the pheno- 

 mena of combustion have transformed into carbonic acid. 



Forests formerly abounded in Europe. In Gallia, Germania, 

 Illyria, Sarmatia, whole provinces were covered with immense woods 

 of ancient and patriarchal trees. Civilization has destroyed them in 

 great part, and often without discernment. At the present day few 

 forests in Europe remain untouched. They are rare in Western Asia, 

 in" Central Asia, and in Northern Asia ; rarer still in the Chinese 

 empire, where the population is denser than in any other country of 

 the world, and where it is the great object of the policy of the State 

 that not a rood of land shall be lost for the culture of plants valuable 

 as food or for industrial purposes. It is only to the south of the 

 Himalaya Mountains, in the still savage and scantily peopled regions 

 of India and Indo-China, that one sees the great vegetables of the 

 Tropical Zone agglomerated in compact masses of considerable extent. 



