26 Trees harked hy Animals. 



barren and wildest part of the down, there yet linger 

 some stunted oaks intersi^ersed among the ash copses 

 whicli to this da^' are called ' the Chace,' and are 

 proA^ed by documentary evidence to stand on the site 

 of an ancient deer forest, A deer forest, too, there 

 is (though seven or eight miles distant, yet on the 

 same range of hills) to this very day tenanted by 

 the antlered stag. Such evidence could be multi- 

 plied ; but this is enough to establish the fact that 

 for the whole breadth of the hills to have been cov- 

 ered with wood is well within possibility. 



I may even go further, and say that, if left to 

 itself, it would in a few generations revert to that 

 condition ; for this reason : that when a clump of 

 trees is planted here, experience has shown that it is 

 not so much the wind or the soil which hinders their 

 growth as the attacks of animals wild and tame. 

 Babbits in cold, frosty weather have a remarkable 

 taste for the bark of the young ash-saplings : they 

 nibble it. off as clean as if stripped with a knife, of 

 course frequently killing the plant. Cattle — of which 

 a few wander on the hills — are equall3' destructive 

 to the young green shoots or ' tops ' of man}- trees. 

 Young horses especially will bark almost any smooth- 

 barked tree, not to eat, but as if to relieve their teeth 

 by tearing it off. In the meadows all the young 

 oaks that spring up from dropped acorns out in the 

 grass are invariably torn up by cattle and the still 

 closer-cropping sheep. If the sheep and cattle were 

 removed, and the plough stood still for a century, 

 ash and beech and oak and hawthorn would reassert 

 themselves, and these wide, open downs become 

 again a vast forest, as doubtless they were when the 



