CHAPTER VI 



IS THERE A WOOD FAMINE COMING? 



TT is hard for us to believe that until the time 

 -*- of Columbus, and even later, the world got on 

 very well without coal. When Shakespeare was a 

 boy, wood or peat made all the household fires 

 of England. Coal was used only sparingly by 

 smiths and manufacturers. 



Old Enghsh books call coal " sea coal," because 

 when it was first burned, long before the days of 

 railroads, it used to be brought by sea from remote 

 parts of England, where it was mined, to the cities 

 where it was wanted. 



In Shakespeare's day, English forests were al- 

 ready vanishing before the axe. Holinshed, a 

 writer of the time, laments " that if woods go so 

 fast to decay in the next hundred years as they 

 have done in this, it is to be feared that broom, 

 turf, straw, sedge, and also sea coal will be good 

 merchandise, even in the city of London itself." 



About a hundred years after Holinshed be- 

 wailed the forest destruction which he saw, all the 

 statesmen of England became anxious about the 

 vanishing of the English woods. They did not 



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