PRODUCED BY MAN. 795 



of Timber in Foreign Countries, from which a very large amount of 

 most useful information can be procured for the very moderate 

 charge of elevenpence, one penny less than a shilling— a fact which 



* would have rejoiced the heart of the late Mr. Joseph Hume. If in 

 addition to this work we bad rendered available to us the usufruct 

 of the vast experience recorded in the Blue Books of the Indian 

 Forestry and Sanitary Departments, in a volume of anything like 

 the same size, I do not say of anything like the same price, the 

 India Office would add considerably to the very large claims it has 

 established upon the gratitude and acknowledgments both of men 



: of science and men of action by the publication of those invaluable 

 volumes. 



I do not propose, indeed I do not dare, to attempt to give a 



^ summary of the results of very many volumes here alluded to, 

 pleasant and even absorbing reading though many of them have 

 proved themselves to be. I will not discuss the curious belief still 

 prevalent in Spain, to the effect that trees breed birds, though 

 somewhat similar articles of faith are not without adherents nearer 

 home, merely observing, so that I may affront no one, that it would 

 be truer to say that the destruction of trees leads to the banishment 

 of birds, and thereby to the sexual, and in that ease spontaneous, 

 generation of insects. Nor will I speculate as to whether the hatred 

 of a tree, of which you will be told in travelling in countries and 

 districts at home and abroad (even in Sicily, see Fischer, 1. c. p. 

 135), where the Celtic or other pristine ethnological element is still 

 strong in the natives, is due to a hereditarily transmitted recollec- 

 tion of the days when, as the capitulary just quoted shows, man had 

 to wage war against the forests, or a similarly transmitted recollec- 

 tion of the much more recent forest-laws and the feudal state of 

 things contemporaneous with them. Neither, on the other hand, 



the goats and the camels, as compared with the agency of the human inhabitants, 

 who besides employing the two organic means for destruction just now mentioned, 

 also ' hack, cut, and burn,' will be found instructively, though briefly, discussed in 

 this essay. I take this opportunity of adding to this bibliography the names of three 

 books with the contents of which I was not acquainted when I wrote as above. 

 They are — 



' Wald, Klima, und Wasser, von Dr. von Libumau,' 1878. This little octavo is 

 one of the Munich series of Science Primers, being Bd. xxix. of ' Die Naturkrafte, 

 eine Naturwissenschaftliche Volksbibliothek.' 



• Die forstlichen Verhaltnisse Frankreichs, von Dr. A. v. Seckendorff,* 1879. 



•Der Wald im Natioualen Wirthschaftsleben, vou Ph. Geyer,' 1879. 



