GENERAL FEATURES OF THE COUNTRY. 11 



should scarcely have used the term complain it was 

 rather disappointment than complaint which was expressed, 

 for he had perceived the fact that all forests of easy access 

 had been subjected to exploitation, repeated again and 

 again, so soon as the trees of the renewed forest had 

 attained a size which gave them a marketable value, 

 which was long before they could attain to the growth of 

 what are known as forest irees. 



Mr A. G Guillemard, with whose graphic accounts of 

 his Forest Rambles in many lands are enriched the pages 

 of Forestry, thus tells of the forests of Norway : 



' If it were not for the broken character of the country, 

 which is every where diversified by mountain ranges, undu- 

 lating plains of small area, on which the peasants grow fair 

 crops of barley, oats, and potatoes, and deep ravines, down 

 which broad blue torrents, beloved of trout and salmon 

 fishers, plunge madly in their seaward course, the forest 

 scenery of Southern Norway might be deemed somewhat 

 monotonous. There is but little variety of foliage, for 

 Norwegian timber trees are few in number of species. 

 Those most common are the spruce and Scotch fir, both 

 of which attain a great size in favoured localities, both in 

 point of altitude and girth. In many places one may 

 observe magnificient specimens of spruce firs of from a 

 hundred to as much as a hundred and fifty feet, in height, 

 and of exquisite symmetry and grace. When of this great 

 height, however, they lose some portion of their beauty of 

 form by reason of the lower branches having decayed, and 

 either having fallen off from the parent stem or become 

 denuded of foliage. The Scotch firs suffer still more in 

 this respect, and all that attain any great height are bare 

 of branches for the lower sixty or eighty feet, rearing 

 straight ruddy trunks crowned with wide-spreading 

 boughs, thickly clad with dark-green needles. In the 

 magnificent forests of pine and fir which clothe the 

 Sierra Nevada range in California to my mind the most 

 beautiful forests in the world, those of tropic countries not 



