JARDINAGE. 95 
generally burned annually, and the consequence is that 
the water has failed. For instance, the mountain behind 
my house, which rises to the height of 1,756 feet, was 
covered with high grass and thousands of beautiful bulbous 
flowering plants and shrubs, and its whole face and 
offshoots adorned with Yellow-wood or other valuable 
trees ; now these are all gone; not a Yellow-wood or other 
tree worth anything is left, and only a useless growth of 
bushes occupy their place, and the consequence is that a 
stream that supplied my garden and some others, runs 
now only after rain. The whole face of the mountain, if 
planted with oak, firs, and other useful timbers, might not 
only be valuable, but again it might protect the water. 
But almost every year, by the idle and reckless, the moun- 
tain is fired, and all is destroyed. It is now burning 
fiercely. In the kloof there still stand the charred stumps 
of large Yellow-wood trees.’ 
Such appear to be the only remains of the forests once 
flourishing in the neighbourhood of Somerset. 
This may be considered as athird stage of the destruc- 
tion of forests—the final—in which they entirely dis- 
appear. And to this those spoken of as being destroyed in 
the vicinity of the Gamptoos River are likely soon to 
come. I am informed that ‘the whole of the Crown 
Forest Reserve and vacant land in the ward of Van. 
Staden’s River, which comprises also the Field Cornetzy 
and ward of Eland’s River, is to be disposed of on a twenty- 
one years’ lease; other portions, not of great extent and 
value, are to be annexed to the properties adjoining them ; 
and the office of Forest Ranger is to be abolished.’ 
Similar results have been seen by others elsewhere, 
In a paper by Lady Verney, in the Contemporary Review, 
I find the following statement of a generally accepted fact: 
‘The question of the supply of timber for the future is all 
over the world-becoming very serious; the sources ure 
- gradually exhausted, while scarcely anything is done to 
repair the waste, except by England and in parts of Ger- 
