118 EFFECTS OF FORESTS ON MOISTURE. 



three hundred and fifty years ago, covered a continuous surface of not 

 less than two thousand acres in the interior of the island, not to 

 mention scattered groups of trees. 



While I was at the Cape I wrote to St. Helena for information on 

 the subject, and in reply his Excellency, H. R. Janisch, now Governor 

 of the island, at once supplied me with the following information, 

 embodied in notes published on the Natural History of St. Helena : — 

 " Viewed from the sea the island offers little or nothing to the eye 

 but an assemblage of lofty and barren hills, intersected in all 

 directions with deep and narrow valleys, in many cases little better 

 than ravines, and generally devoid of vegetation, excepting here and 

 there patches of prickly pear, samphire, and profitless weeds, the 

 wooded peaks in the interior being in most positions hidden from 

 view by the almost perpendicular cliff's running down to the sea. 

 Bat when first discovered, in 1502, it was in the valleys almost 

 covered with trees right down to the water's edge. These trees 

 appear to have been principally gum-wood, ebony, and red-wood." 

 Tiie gum-wood flourished nearest to the sea ; the ebony and red- 

 wood covered the slopes of the mountain ; while the hill tops appear 

 to have been covered with the cabbage tree and ferns — the former 

 (areca oleracea) presenting from a little distance the appearance of a 

 tree bearing stocks of cabbage, or of brocoli, at the extremities of its 

 branches. While such was the state of vegetation, it must have been 

 an island well watered everywhere. 



Bat the earlier governors and settlers made sad havoc among the 

 trees ; and herds of goats and of swine being allowed to run loose on 

 the land, young growing trees, which might have supplied the waste, 

 were destroyed, and the island became almost denuded. All the 

 ebony trees have long since disappeared : the last, a tree remarkable 

 for its excessive hardness, size, and density, was found on Deadwood. 

 The red-wood is now scarce, and, like the ebony, would altogether 

 have disappeared, had not Governor Byefield caused two young trees 

 to be set at Plantation House, from which two all at present on the 

 island have been propagated. And a comparison of the cabbage trees 

 of the present with the remains of those of the past tell of a stunted 

 growth. What was the consequence of this extensive destruction of 

 trees? "Incidentally we find," says my correspondent, "in the 

 records of the last century, accounts of repeated and almost periodical 

 visitations of very severe drought, occasioning ruinous losses of cattle 

 and crops." 



Towarda the close of the last century, however, the denudation of 



