326 THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST 



a general statement could have done, the vast influence which 

 man has wielded upon the primeval forest. His use of tim- 

 ber for the building of houses and ships, for household fires 

 and especially for fuel to carry on his great industries ; his 

 destruction of the woods to ensure his military conquests 

 and his peaceful journeyings, to rid him of the annoyances of 

 thieves and beasts of prey, and to make way for his smiling 

 fields of grain; the influences of his flocks and herds and of 

 his unwitting collaboration with the forces of nature; all 

 these had but one effect to demolish woodland and make 

 a country, once rich in forest primeval as the wilds beyond 

 the Atlantic, a land whose barrenness became the wonder 

 and standing joke of southern travellers. The fact will stand 

 repeating that woodland, which in the days of the Upper 

 Forest of the Peat, clothed half the country, has been reduced 

 to a miserable remnant scarcely covering one-twentieth of 

 the land surface of Scotland. How far do we seem to have 

 travelled, even since that day in the sixteenth century, when 

 Bishop Leslie wrote of Scotland? 



The woddes selfes nocht onlie profitable to the utilitie of timber, and to 

 that use,... are verie jocund and jellie 1 and gif we myt speik it, in a maner 

 peirles in pleisour. 



1 French, joli, pretty. 



