164 Mr. J. W. Dawson on the Dest? 



niferous trees, the fire often leaves nothing- but bare trunks and 

 branches, or at most a little foliage, scorched to a rusty-brown 

 color. In either case, avast quantity of wood remains uncon- 

 sumed, and soon becomes sufficiently dry to furnish food for a 

 new conflagration ; so that the same portion of forest is liable to 

 be repeatedly burned, until it becomes a bare and desolate " bar- 

 ren," with only a few charred and wasted trunks towering above 

 the blackened surface. This has been the fate of large districts 

 in Nova Scotia and the neighboring colonies ; and as these burned 

 tracts could not be immediately occupied for agricultural purpo- 

 ses, and are diminished in value by the loss of their timber, they 

 have been left to the unaided efforts of nature to restore their 

 original verdure. Before proceeding to consider more particularly 

 the mode in which this restoration is effected, and the appearan- 

 ces by which it is accompanied, I may quote, from an article in 

 a colonial periodical, the views of Mr. Titus Smith, secretary oi 

 the Board of Agriculture of Nova Scotia, on this subject. These 

 views, as the results of long and careful observation, are entitled 

 to much respect. 



"If an acre or two be cut clown in the midst of a forest, and 

 then neglected, it will soon be occupied by a growth similar to 

 that which was cut down ; but when all the timber, on tracts of 

 great size, is killed by fires, except certain parts of swamps, a 

 very different growth springs up ; at first a great number of herbs 

 and shrubs, which did not grow on the land when covered by 

 living wood. The turfy coat, filled with the decaying fibres of 

 the roots of the trees and plants of the forest, now all killed by 

 the fire, becomes a kind of hot-bed, and seeds which had lain dor- 

 mant for centuries, spring up and flourish in the mellow soil 

 On the most barren portions, the blueberry appears almost every- 

 where ; great fields of red raspberries and fire- weed or French 

 willow, spring up along the edges of the beech and hemlock land, 

 and abundance of redberried-elder and wild red-cherry appear soon 

 after ; but in a few years, the raspberries and most of the herbage 

 disappear, and are followed by a growth of firs, white and yellow 

 birch, and poplar. When a succession of fires has occurred, small 

 shrubs occupy the barren, the Kalmia or sheep-poison being the 

 most abundant ; and, in the course of ten or twelve years form s° 

 much turf, that a thicket of small alder begins to grow, under the 

 shelter of which fir, spruce, hacmetac (larch), and white birch 

 spring up. When the ground is thoroughly shaded by a thicket 

 twenty feet high, the species which originally occupied the ground 

 begins to prevail, and suffocate the wood which sheltered rt) 

 and within sixty years, the land will generally be covered with a 

 young growth of the same kind that it produced of old." Ai- 

 ming the above statements to be a correct summary of the princi- 

 pal modes in which forests are reproduced, we may proceed to 

 consider them more in detail. 



