TIMBER PRODUCTION 49 
One great defect of the coppice with standards is the 
enormous increase in the ground flora after coppicing, 
with consequent impoverishment of soil, particularly 
by breakdown of the humus. 
Rabbits—In quite a number of woods upon the 
lighter soils rabbits flourish and multiply to an in- 
ordinate degree, and there can be little doubt that the 
paucity of self-sown seedlings of our forest trees can 
in most cases be laid to their charge. It cannot be too 
strongly emphasised that rabbits and good forestry 
cannot go together. This fundamental fact must be 
realised if our British woodlands are to be improved. 
No one who has carefully examined any large area 
. of coppice can fail to have noticed the common tendency 
toward degeneration, even where the stools are horn- 
beam with its proverbial longevity. There are in the 
oak-hornbeam woods of Hertfordshire many hundreds 
of acres where there is scarcely a living stool, and the 
soil is being exhausted by a rank growth of brambles. 
This condition, there is good reason to believe, has been 
brought ‘about almost entirely by the depredations of 
rabbits, which nibble off the sprouting shoots that 
appear after coppicing. A systematic destruction of 
these animals would not only result in a much smaller 
accumulated debt consequent upon the saving in wire 
netting, but in all probability the large number of 
seedlings surviving would make it possible to regenerate 
disafforested areas by natural means. If rabbit fences 
could be dispensed with, the saving effected would 
represent between £1 10s. and £2 per acre, or an ac- 
cumulated debt, reckoned at 4 per cent. on a hundred 
years’ rotation, of from £76 to £101. Viewed from 
E 
