PRIMITIVE TREATMENT OF FORESTS. val 
prietor, for which a consideration had been given, And 
the general practice of burning the vedd, which is there 
followed—whether applied to grass, or to other herbage 
and bush—is the same in principle; but what is now 
under consideration is the application of it to forests and 
trees. The practice may be said to be universal. 
‘When multiplying, man had filled the open grounds 
along the margin of the rivers,’ says Marsh, in his valuable 
volume entitled The Earth as Modified by Human Action, ' 
‘and the lakes, and the sea, and sufficiently peopled the 
natural meadows and savannahs of the interior, where 
such existed, he could find room for expansion and further 
growth only” by the removal of a portion of the forest that 
hemmed him in. The destruction of the woods, then, was 
man’s first geographical conquest, his first violation of the, 
harmonies of inanimate nature. Primitive man had little 
occasion to fell trees for fuel, or for the construction of 
dwellings, boats, and the’ implements of his rude agricul- 
ture and handicrafts ; windfalls would furnish a thin 
population with a sufficient supply of such material, and 
if occasionally a growing tree was cut, the injury to the 
forest would be too insignificant to be at all appreciable, 
The accidental escape and spread of fire, or possibly the 
combustion of forests by lightning [?] must have first 
suggested the advantages to be derived from the removal 
of too abundant and extensive woods, and, at the same 
time, have pointed out a means whereby a large tract of 
surface could readily be cleared of much of this natural 
encumbrance. As soon as agriculture had commenced at 
all, it would be observed that the growth of cultivated 
plants, as well as of many species of wild vegetation, was 
particularly rapid and luxuriant on soils which had been 
burned over, and thus a new stimulus would be given to 
the practice ‘of destroying the woods by fire, as.a means of 
both extending the open grounds, and making the agri- 
culture of a yet more productive sort. After a few 
harvests had exhausted the first rank fertility of the virgin 
mould, or when weeds and briars and the sprouting roots 
