156 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
color, and sometimes without petals. I saw no soft, 
spreading,-second-growth white-pines, with smooth bark, 
acknowledging the presence of the wood-chopper, but 
even the young white-pines were all tall and slender 
rough-barked trees. 
Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours. There 
you are never reminded that the wilderness which you 
are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood- 
lot, some widow’s thirds, from which her ancestors have 
sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some 
old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got 
a plan too, and old bound-marks may be found every 
forty rods, if you will search. ’T is true, the map may 
inform you that you stand on land granted by the State 
to some academy, or on Bingham’s purchase; but these 
names do not impose on you, for you see nothing to 
remind you of the academy or of Bingham. What 
were the “ forests ” of England to these ? One writer 
relates of the Isle of Wight, that in Charles the Sec¬ 
ond’s time “ there were woods in the island so complete 
and extensive, that it is said a squirrel might have trav¬ 
elled in several parts many leagues together on the 
top of the trees.” If it were not for the rivers, (and 
he might go round their heads,) a squirrel could here 
travel thus the whole breadth of the country. 
We have as yet had no adequate account of a primi¬ 
tive pine-forest. I have noticed that in a physical atlas 
lately published in Massachusetts, and used in our schools, 
the 66 wood land ” of North America is limited almost 
solely to the valleys of the Ohio and some of the Great 
Lakes, and the great pine-forests of the globe are not 
represented. In our vicinity, for instance, New Bruns¬ 
wick and Maine are exhibited as bare as Greenland. 
