AMONG THE OAKS IOI 
supplies of timber of different sizes at each return 
of the fall to any given copse. This was easily 
explainable. As Percival Lewis remarks of the 
New Forest about ninety years ago, ‘The rabbit, 
in his pursuit of food did much injury, and the 
cutting of browse wood’ (for feeding the royal 
deer), ‘as it was carried on in former times, must 
have been attended with considerable depreda- 
tions; the holly and the thorn are often the 
preservers of the seedling oak.’ The same applies 
to-day to a great many good oak-producing dis- 
tricts. In the self-sown woods of Sussex, some 
friendly furze bush has often been the guardian 
angel of many a seedling now grown into a stout 
and sturdy sapling or pole. The consequence is 
that in most of our copsewoods the standard trees 
are not more or less regularly distributed over 
the area, and there is no regular gradation in 
the ages of the standard trees forming the over- 
wood. Again, many of the oak trees, with large 
spreading branches, have been allowed to remain 
long after completing their main growth and 
thus attaining their marketable maturity. Yet 
~~ the beautiful old oak trees that have endured 
from generation to generation in woods owned 
