532 PREHISTORIC EUROPE. 



Fiirstenau is distant some fourteen or fifteen miles from 

 Lingen, and the intervening country is now bare of trees. I 

 have but little faith, however, in the statements made in many 

 of our local and county histories as to the wooded condition of 

 Scotland in early historical times. Some of these statements 

 can be shown by documentary evidence to be untrue, while 

 others are unsupported by any proof. There can be little doubt, 

 I think, that most of the stories in question have been suggested 

 by the appearance in the peat-bogs of trees which have evidently 

 grown in situ. If these buried trees had never been observed, 

 we in Scotland should probably have heard very little of the 

 demolition of ancient forests by the Eomans or our " auld ene- 

 mies of England." 



An examination of the Scottish peat-bogs has led me to be- 

 lieve that we are now living in a dry period, for the peat is 

 wasting away generally throughout the country, the rate of decay 

 far exceeding that of growth and increase. And there is 

 legendary and documentary testimony to show that the growth 

 of many of our peat-bogs had already been arrested at a very 

 early date, for the appearances described or incidentally referred 

 to clearly betoken that the bogs had assumed a wasted aspect 

 long before the general adoption of our present systems of 

 drainage. I strongly suspect, therefore, that that rainy period 

 to which I attribute the destruction of by far the larger portion 

 of the buried trees in the upper part of our peat-bogs had passed 

 away or become largely modified even as far back as the Koman 

 occupation. Agricultural progress, however, has so greatly 

 interfered with natural operations that it is impossible to say to 

 what extent the changed conditions are due to a lessened rain- 

 fall. Mr. Blytt's observations in Norway have led him to similar 

 conclusions. He thinks that the present is somewhat drier, the 

 peat of the last rainy period being sorely wasted and decayed, 

 even in the rainy district of Floroe, where the remaining masses 

 of sphagnum are overgrown with lichen and heather. In 

 numerous places, indeed, the bogs are often entirely covered with 

 heather and small trees. And there are many signs, he says, 



