CHAPTER VI 

 THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST 



"The broad woodland parcelled into farms"; 

 There 



" Lies the hawk's cast, the mole has made his run, 

 The hedgehog underneath the plantain bores, 

 The rabbit fondles his own harmless face, 

 The slow-worm creeps and the thin weasel there 

 Follows the mouse, and all is open field." 



TENNYSON. 



ONE inevitable result has followed in the wake of civiliza- 

 tion wherever man, the transformer, has penetrated the 

 disappearance of woodland. It was not so in the days of primi- 

 tive cultures. The great forest tracts of America, which 

 covered the whole country except in prairie regions, survived 

 without significant change during the undisturbed occupation 

 of the simple Indian races. It is true that the Indian hunter 

 made his clearings in the forest, and tended his narrow 

 fields, but so soon as he moved to new regions in pursuit of 

 game, Nature resumed control, and in a generation the old 

 clearing was obliterated by fresh growths of scrub and timber. 

 " In the husbandry of Nature" says Marsh, "there are no 

 fallows." 



It must have been thus in the days of the early occupa- 

 tion of Scotland, when Nature ruled the wilds; but, as his 

 power increased, man gathered the reins from Nature's hands 

 and drove his chariot of progress through the heart of the 

 forest, leaving scars which time could no longer heal. In 

 America, under the rule of white men, the native forests are 

 fast disappearing ; in Scotland they have all but gone. 



