And above all others in use — above all others in money value, everywhere piercing the 

 hard-wood foliage roof, rising to double its height above it ; lofty, dense, sombre, fully 

 exposed to, but almost immovable by, the tempest, stood in far-spreading masses the 

 giants of the forest — the great Canadian pine. 



It is not to be supposed that the forest of that day stood in clearly defined sections 

 of different woods. Trees of other species from the predominant always intermixed, but 

 in many sections to so slight an extent that those who saw that vast woodland can well 

 remember where, every here and there, all appeared maple, all beech, or all hemlock, far 

 as eye could discern. " What kind of land is it ? " asks Cooper's Major of the Indian. 

 " All sugar-bush ; what you want better 1 " is the reply. 



If the lord of these servants should at any time return from a far country, and 

 demand to know the use the Canadians had made of his talent of timber, we should be 

 puzzled to extricate it from the napkin of fire in which we had wrapped it. For the 

 advance of the Anglo-Saxon across the North American region has been, so far as the 

 trees are concerned, like that of Attila, who boasted that no grass ever grew where his 

 charger's feet had trodden. No destruction was ever more ruthless, more injurious, more 

 lasting in its effects, or more difficult of repair, than that to which Canadians, for the 

 past hundred years, have cheered one another on. Among all the politicians who have 

 in turn saved our country, few of them have thought it worth while to attempt to save 

 the timber. And yet much might very easily, very valuably, have been done towards 

 that end. But the Genius of Preservation was absent, while that of Destruction filled the 

 land with his voice. Here might have been seen a rustic, placidly destroying a grove of 

 white pine, worth a million of dollars, in order to uncover a barren waste of sandy land, 

 which at first gave but little wheat, and has since pastured but a few cows ; there another, 

 devoting to the flames a district of red oak, would have kept Malaga five years in wine 

 puncheons, that he may bare a piece of .hard red clay on a mountain slope, which he shall 

 try to cultivate for a few years, and shall abandon when the winter torrents have washed 

 the scanty humus away from the hard pan which all impenetrable lies below. Here is 

 yet another who, to advance himself a little by burning in June a fallow which should 

 have lain till fall, and thereby save a matter of ten of twenty dollars, has let fire run 

 through five hundred acres of good hemlock bush, killing the young trees, girdling the 

 old, and half ruining the soil for future agricultural purposes. Here you might have 

 seen one rolling together and burning great logs of black walnut (a wood invaluable for 

 furniture, of which the Canadian supply is long since exhausted, and the United States 

 supply almost so), in order to make a farm, all the profit of which for forty years would 

 not reach one-tenth of the sum the walnut, if left standing till now, would easily have 

 drawn. Nay, an item which will be more comprehensible by every one, I have myself 

 seen, on the sandy lands near Toronto, great heaps of almost clear pine, worth to-day 

 forty dpllars a thousand, given over to the flames. 



All old residents of Toronto can well remember the days before the railways. the old 



wharves piled high with pine for steamboat fuel — the long procession of wood-waggons 

 two cord on each — down Yonge street, and from the Kingston and Dundas roads. I 

 fancy the pine so used, would now sell for a good deal more than all the steamers and all 

 the freight they ever carried. 



