16 FORESTRY OF NORWAY. 



' we had to cross a tract of country of the wildest character. 

 It was for the most part densely covered with the primae- 

 val forest. In many places the tall spruce towered to the 

 height of from 100 (as I calculated) to 150 feet, and were 

 of unusual girth ; and the great bulk of the giants of a 

 former generation, which lay mouldering in slow decay, 

 told that no hand of man had been there, as in districts 

 more accessible, to appropriate the statliest of the products 

 of the wilderness. Nature reigned in all her solitary 

 majesty : her operations were uncontrolled. Every age 

 was there; from those lofty pilea standing erect in the 

 ripe fulness of their majestic forms, to the young growth 

 that, springing up in every clearance over which the 

 tempest had swept, told of their direct descent from the 

 patriarch of a hundred years, whose crumbling ruins they 

 shrouded with a graceful shrubbery. We count the races 

 of man : who shall say how many generations have here 

 successively germinated and sprung up in youthful vigour 

 and beauty, in a maturer age have hung out from their 

 feathered boughs those pendent tassels of cones, the seed 

 pods of which were destined to perpetuate their species 

 have ripened, decayed, and gone to dust since the epoch 

 of the great catastrophe which moulded these wild regions 

 into their present form, and left their bared surface to the 

 gentle and uniform operations with which vegetation 

 following in the track of ruin effaces its hardest features, 

 and renews the face of the earth ? Touching images from 

 the earliest times have been drawn from the fall of the 

 leaf, as in successive years the short-lived progeny of a 

 single season are thrown of from their parent stems. How 

 much more striking the contemplation of the processes of 

 nature in growth, decay, and reproduction, on the scale on 

 which it is presented in the depths of a primaeval forest ! 



' The general character of the country was irregular, with 

 no leading valleys and few levels of any extent. We 

 mounted ridges of the steepest declivity, where the stunted 

 pines told of the elevation at which we had arrived, to 

 plunge on the other side far down into the depths of dark 



