GENERAL FEATURES OF THE COUNTRY. il 
should scarcely have used the term complain—it was 
rather disappointment than complaint which was expressed, 
for he had perceived the fact that all forests of easy access 
had been subjected to exploitation, repeated again: and 
again, so soon as the trees of the renewed forest had 
attained a size which gave them a marketable value, 
which was long before they could attain to the growth of 
what are known as forest urees. 
Mr A. G Guillemard, with whose graphic accounts of 
his Forest Rambles in many lands are enriched the pages 
of Forestry, thus tells of the forests of Norway :— 
‘If it were not for the broken character of the country, 
which is everywhere diversified by mountain ranges, undu- 
lating plains of small area, on which the peasants grow fair 
crops of barley, oats, and potatoes, and deep ravines, down 
which broad blue torrents, beloved of trout and salmon 
fishers, plunge madly in their seaward course, the forest 
scenery of Southern Norway might be deemed somewhat 
monotonous. There is but little variety of foliage, for 
Norwegian timber trees are few in number of species. 
Those most common are the spruce and Scotch fir, both 
of which attain a great size in favoured localities, both in 
point of altitude and girth. In many places one may 
observe magnificient specimens of spruce firs of from a 
~~ hundred to as much as a hundred and fifty feet, in height, 
and of exquisite symmetry and grace. When of this great 
height, however, they lose some portion of their beauty of 
form by reason of the lower branches having decayed, and 
either having fallen off from the parent stem or become 
denuded of foliage. The Scotch firs suffer still more in 
this respect, and all that attain any great height are bare 
of branches for the lower sixty or eighty feet, rearing 
straight ruddy trunks crowned with wide-spreading 
boughs, thickly clad with dark-green needles. In the 
magnificent forests of pine and fir which clothe the 
Sierra Nevada range in California—to my mind the most 
_ beautiful forests in the world, those of tropic countries not 
