184 
ON THE DECREASE OF THE OAK IN BRITAIN. 
but this national characteristic we have now totally lost. A few giants of old,, 
indeed, still remain, but they only serve to point out in a yet stronger light the 
degeneration of our present condition.* The country that can now perhaps, with 
the greatest truth, claim the superiority in this respect, is Canada, and the United 
States; and why ? Not because the inhabitants of the new world have seen our 
negligence and improvidence, and have therefore determined to take a warning 
from experience, but because the work of destruction, although rapidly progres¬ 
sing, has not yet had sufficient time to extirpate the noble and majestic forests 
which extend, almost without interruption, from the shores of the Pacific on the 
West, to the Atlantic on the East. And that we were in by-gone ages in the 
same state, is perhaps one reason why we have now to lament the decrease, 
amounting almost to extermination, of this noble tree. Former superabundance 
of timber led to wanton destruction, and our ancestors—never dreaming, amidst 
such plenty, of the possibility of the present generation suffering from their pro¬ 
fusion—employed in the construction of their Halls and Castles that tenfold 
strength and thickness which is visible in all the architecture down to the reign 
of Elizabeth; and piled their hearths with many a log which we would now 
gladly see in the furniture of our modern drawing-rooms. The lord commanded 
the work of destruction, and the vassal obeyed, with that readiness which all 
uneducated minds feel when engaged in destroying the work or growth of years, 
in the construction or progress of which they take no delight or gratification, but 
pass it by with apathy and indifference. 
To a certain extent this has had a desirable effect, by extending the proportion 
of productive ground, which an increasing population required, and in exter¬ 
minating or diminishing those animals which the increased civilisation of mankind 
had rendered obnoxious and injurious to their comfort and security. For “ when 
great changes are made on the surface of a country, as when forests are changed into 
open land, and marshes into corn fields, or any other change that is considerable, 
the changes of the climate must correspond; and as the wild productions are very 
much affected by that, they must also undergo changes ; and these changes may 
in time amount to the entire extinction of some of the old tribes, both of plants 
and of animals, the modification of others to the full extent that the hereditary 
specific characters admit, and the introduction of not varieties only, but of species 
altogether new.”— Mudie’s Guide to the Observation of Nature, 
But we of the present day have no such excuse; we go on consuming and 
destroying, at the same time aware of the injury, if not moral crime, we are 
* Of eighty-seven British forests enumerated by Spelman, not above nine remain.—Note to 
Tighe’s Plants^ 2nd edit., 1812, 
