172 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



done, to any one accustomed to travel in the woods, that it 

 might hardly be considered worth while to give these proofs 

 in detail. ISTor shall I bring forward more than a very small 

 portion of the evidence at my command. 



Perhaps all that can be brought forward in its defence is 

 that, to some extent, it may act as a nature' s-jpruner of the 

 trees, but I believe any forester, or person who has been in 

 daily and yearly observation of their habits, would gladly 

 dispense with their services in this respect. True, also, one 

 correspondent writes as follows : " The squirrel is now very 

 numerous in this county (Dumbartonshire), and is sometimes 

 very destructive to firs. It is only, however, when firs are 

 planted too thickly, and when there is a lack of branches, 

 that they are so, from nipping off the shoots. If the branches 

 were allowed to spread as they ought to, they will find 

 food enough without mounting up for the top shoot." But 

 judging from a large mass of correspondence, this is not 

 always the case, or if so, only to such a very infinitesimal 

 extent, that the good done by nature s-pruners is swamped by 

 the much greater amount of harm.* Of course it is needless 

 to point out that if large extents of young wood are planted 

 for profit, in a country inhabited by the species whose food 

 consists of these woods, or their cones, and bark, and shoots, 

 an increase in the numbers of these animals must be expected. 

 One does not hear much of damages done to natural forests, 

 as those of Norway, Sweden, or Eussia, by birds or animals. 

 As nature s-pruners, the squirrels usually lop off the cones, 

 which, on discovering that they contain no seeds, they drop 

 to the ground ; this does no harm to the tree, if it does no 

 good ; and, as believed by more than one of my correspon- 

 dents, the seeds of the cones form the natural food of the 

 species, and the saccharine inner bark is an acquired taste. 



In this connection it may be also well to consider if, in some 

 cases at all events, the damage done to shoots and bark 

 does not result from the fondness of squirrels for certain 



* Several others of my correspondents share this opinion — that as a rule 

 the tops are not injured to anj' appreciable extent ; but, as stated in the text, 

 by far the larger number — quite eight-tenths of my correspondents — hold a 

 very decidedly different opinion. 



