28 
AMERICAN FORESTS. 
whenever the Indian, in consequence of war or the exhaustion 
of the beasts of the chase, abandoned the narrow fields he bad 
planted and the woods he had burned over, they speedily 
returned,by a succession of herbaceous, arborescent, and arbo¬ 
real growths, to their original state. Even a single generation 
sufficed to restore them almost to their primitive luxuriance 
of forest vegetation.* The unbroken forests had attained to 
their maximum density and strength of growth, and, as the 
older trees decayed and fell, they were succeeded by new 
shoots or seedlings, so that from century to century no per¬ 
ceptible change seems to have occurred in the wood, except 
the slow, spontaneous succession of crops. This succession 
involved no interruption of growth, and but little break in 
the “ boundless contiguity of shade; ” for, in the husbandry 
of nature, there are no fallows. Trees fall singly, not by 
square roods, and the tall pine is hardly prostrate, before the 
light and heat, admitted to the ground by the removal of the 
dense crown of foliage which had shut them out, stimulate the 
germination of the seeds of broad-leaved trees that had lain, 
waiting this kindly influence, perhaps for centuries. Two 
natural causes, destructive in character, were, indeed, in 
operation in the primitive American forests, though, in the 
Northern colonies, at least, there were sufficient compensa¬ 
tions ; for we do not discover that any considerable permanent 
change was produced by them. I refer to the action of 
ley, which cannot properly be said ever to have been a field of British 
colonization; but of the original colonies, and their dependencies in the 
territory of the present United States, and in Canada. It is, however, 
equally true of the Western prairies as of the Eastern forest land, that they 
had arrived at a state of equilibrium, though under very different condi¬ 
tions. 
* The great fire of Miramichi in 1825, probably the most extensive and 
terrific conflagration recorded in authentic history, spread its ravages over 
nearly six thousand square miles, chiefly of woodland, and was of such 
intensity that it seemed to consume the very soil itself. But so great are 
the recuperative powers of nature, that, in twenty-five years, the ground 
was thickly covered again with trees of fair dimensions, except where cul¬ 
tivation and pasturage kept down the forest growth. 
