■FOEEST ADMINISTRATION. 205 



In England it has long been the practice for nobles and 

 princes of the Royal family, and sovereigns, to be 

 appointed rangers of the Windsor Forest; and for well 

 nigh half a century the office was held by the famous 

 Duchess of Marlborough. She held the office from ]702, 

 when she succeeded the Earl of Portland, till her death in 

 1744, eighty-four years of age if not more, setting the 

 Court at defiance in a very termigant fashion. She was 

 succeeded by William, Duke of Cumberland ; by Henry 

 Frederick, Duke of Cumberland ; by King George III. ; by 

 King William IV.; by the late Prince Consort; and by 

 H.R.H. Prince Christian.* And in British Colonies, as at 

 the Cape of Good Hope, the practice of appointing district 

 magistrates and civil commissioners to be conservators of 

 forests, and field-cornets to be forest warders, has long been 

 the practice. 



The existence of gross abuses in the management of Crown 

 woods and forests of England, similiar to what prevailed 

 in France well nigh 200 years before, was brought to 

 light by evidence collected by a Committee of the House 

 of Commons in 1848 and 1849, and printed by command 

 of the House. Cases of reckless waste in the exploitation 

 of forests in the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, and 

 of depredations which should not have been tolerated, 

 came under my notice, and were reported by me to the 

 Executive and the Legislature, in a Memoir on the Conser- 

 vation and Extension of Forests as a means of counteracting 

 the disastrous consequences following the destruction of bush 

 and herbage by fire, appended to the Report of the Colonial 

 Botanist for 1863 ; in Memoirs on the Forests and Forest 

 Lands of South Africa-, and on The Forest Economy of the 

 Colony, abstracts of which were appended to the Report of 

 the Colonial Botanist for 1866 ; and in evidence given by 

 me before a Select Committee of the Legislative Council 

 of the Cape Colony, appointed 14th August 1865, to con- 

 sider the Colonial Botauist's Report; and after I had left 



* See Forests of England in Byegmu Times (p. 98). 



