CAUSES OF DESTRUCTION 319 



and robbers, from wolves and all wild beasts, Lord deliver 

 us." I have already described the wolf plague and the 

 stages of the downfall of Scottish wolves (p. 115); it is 

 sufficient here to call to mind that their destruction in- 

 volved that of many woods. In the districts of Rannoch and 

 Blair Athole in Perthshire, of Lochaber in Inverness-shire, 

 in the region about Loch Awe in Argyllshire, and in other 

 places as well, local tradition or more definite record asserts 

 that extensive forests were burned down to extirpate the 

 wolves, by demolishing the retreats in which they found 

 refuge. 



INDUSTRIES AND WOODLAND 



A heavy and long-continued drain upon the native forests 

 was made by the demand for wood for industrial purposes. 

 For long Scotland had held a foremost place amongst the 

 peoples who go down to the sea in ships, and the erection 

 of boats and ships of war was a constant tax upon well grown 

 timber. Of one of the latter, the famous "Great Michael" 

 built in 1511 at Newhaven near Leith, it was written that 

 James IV 



buildit the ' Michael,' ane verrie monstruous great ship, whilk tuik sae 

 meikle timber that schee waisted all the woodis in Fyfe, except Falkland 

 Wood, besides the timber that cam out of Norroway. 



Even so the destruction due to boat-building was as 

 nothing to that wrought by the industries in which wood 

 was used for fuel. The manufacture of salt from sea-water 

 was for long a national industry, practised on so extensive 

 a scale along the Firth of Forth, that, as one visitor said, 

 "the works are not easily to [be] numbered" ; and, although 

 at the industry's greatest development, coal was the chief fuel 

 used, in earlier stages the use of wood fires for evaporating 

 the brine must have made serious inroads upon the forests 

 on various parts of the coast. But no other work of man 

 played such havoc with the woodland as the ancient iron 

 industry of Scotland. 



From the days of the Iron Age, a thousand years and 

 more before the opening of the Christian era, till the early 

 years of the nineteenth century, the reduction of iron ore to 

 a state fit for casting, was brought about by a process of 

 fusion with charcoal. Even in the case of a single furnace, 



