EFFECTS OF FOEEST VEGETATION ON CLIMATE. 197 



The following extract from tlie Times, of 16th August, 1876, 

 may tend to show that St. Vincent is not alone as suffering from 

 destruction of woods in the West Indies : — ■, 



In reporting on the agriculture and industry of tlie Danish West Indian 

 Island of St. Croix, Consul Palgrave has to state that of late the year's rainfall 

 has barely averaged 34 inches, and in 1875 it was below 27 inches in the 

 Christiansted division, and was quite inadequate to secure a moderate sugar 

 crop for 1876. Mr. Palgrave says that the rainfall was certainly much more 

 copious in former times. Traces of a tree-growth impossible with such a 

 scanty moisture supply, of shrunken *or dried-up pools, and of stream 

 channels where nothing now flows, exist everywhere throughout the island. 

 This unfortunate climatic modification has, it seems, become normal, not 

 in St. Croix alone but throughout the Virgin Islands and the northerly 

 region of the Lesser Antilles for the last fifteen years or thereabouts. 



There are other instances which I would wish to bring forward 

 on this occasion, the former of which, in September, 1835, I first 

 noticed in the " Magazine of Natural History." I refer to the 

 forest of Bialowieza in Lithuania, of which a description was 

 edited by the Baron de Brincken, Chief Conservator of the 

 National Forests of Poland, and member of the Department of 

 Forests. This work was published at Warsaw in 1826.* It was 

 afterwards, in 1845, briefly noticed by Murchison, De Yerneuil, 

 and Keyserling, in their great work on the " Gleology of Bussia 

 and the Ural Mountains," in connection with an account of the 

 forest, as the abode of the Bos Aurochs or Zubr, supposed to be 

 the Bos TJrus, or Bos priscus of antiquity, and a specimen of 

 which was obtained and presented by Sir !R. I. Murchison to the 

 Royal College of Surgeons, for the investigation of Professor 

 Owen, a description of which is to be found in the Zoological 

 Society's proceedings for 1818, p. 12 to 13. 



Sir Boderick's notice of De Brincken was in connection with 

 an " Account of the Forest of Bialowieza, the habitat of the 

 w*ild Aurochs or Zubr. By Count de Kraskinski (in a letter to 

 Colonel Jackson, Secretary of the Eoyal Greographical Society of 

 London)." 



This forest was formerly a favourite hunting ground of the 

 royal family of Eussia, and remained free from clearings much 

 after the fashion of an American forest. It contained, to a late 

 period, numerous wild animals of the chase, of which the Auroch, 

 or Bison, or Zubr was the chief. 



We need not go further into the history of its inhabitants, but 

 may refer at once to the Baron de Brincken's statement. Indeed, 

 I have only time to make a few slight quotations from my own 



^■'Memoire descriptif sur la Foret Imp6riale de Bialowieza en Lithuanie ; 

 redig6 par le Baron de Brincken, Conservateur en Chef des Forets Nation- 

 ales de Pologne ; membre du D(5partement des Forets a la Commission des 

 Finances et du Tr6sor, Chevalier de I'Ordre de St. Stanislas, 2me classe ; 

 Orne de quatre gravurcs ct d'une carte. Varsovie. Chez (ilucksbcrg, 1826, 

 4to, pp. 127. 



