CHAr. XIV.] 
ST. HELENA. 
285 
here, would carry away the upper soil, and it being a clay marl 
underneath would produce but little ; as it is, we think in case 
it were enclosed it might he greatly improved ” .... “When 
once this wood is gone the island will soon be ruined ” . 
“We viewed the wood’s end which joins the Honourable Com- 
pany’s plantation called the Hutts, but the wood is so destroyed 
that the beginning of the Great Wood is now a whole- mile 
beyond that place, and all the soil between being washed away, 
that distance is now entirely barren.” (MSS. Records, 1716.) In 
1709 the governor reported to the Court of Directors of the 
East India Company that the timber was rapidly disappearing, 
and that the goats should be destroyed for the preservation of the 
ebony wood, and because the island was suffering from droughts. 
The reply was, “ The goats are not to be destroyed, being more 
valuable than ebony.” Thus, through the gross ignorance of 
those in power, the last opportunity of preserving the peculiar 
vegetation of St. Helena, and preventing the island from be- 
coming the comparatively rocky desert it now is, was allowed to 
pass away. 1 Even in a mere pecuniary point of view the error 
was a fatal one, for in the next century (in 1810) another gover- 
nor reports the total destruction of the great forests by the 
1 Mr. Marsh in his interesting work entitled. The Earth as Modified hy 
Human Action (p. 51), thus remarks on the effect of browsing quadrupeds 
in destroying and checking woody vegetation. — “I am convinced that 
forests would soon cover many parts of the Arabian and African deserts 
if man and domestic animals, especially the goat and the camel, were 
banished from them. The hard palate and tongue, and strong teeth and 
jaws of this latter quadruped enable him to break off and masticate tough 
and thorny branches as large as the finger. He is particularly fond of the 
smaller twigs, leaves, and seed-pods of the Sont and other acacias, which, 
like the American robinia, thrive well on dry and sandy soils, and he 
spares no tree the branches of which are within his reach, except, if I 
remember right, the tamarisk that produces manna. Young trees sprout 
plentifully around the springs and along the winter water-courses of the 
desert, and these are just the halting stations of the caravans and their 
routes of travel. In the shade of these trees annual grasses and perennial 
shrubs shoot up, but are mown down hy the hungry cattle of the Bedouin 
as fast as they grow. A few years of undisturbed vegetation would suffice 
to cover such points with groves, and these would gradually extend them- 
selves over soils where now scarcely any green thing but the bitter 
colocynth and the poisonous foxglove is ever seen.” 
