34 
STABILITY OF NATURE. 
In fine, in countries untrodden by man, the proportions 
and relative positions of land and water, the atmospheric 
precipitation and evaporation, the thermometric mean, and 
the distribution of vegetable and animal life, are subject to 
change only from geological influences so slow in their opera¬ 
tion that the geographical conditions may be regarded as 
constant and immutable. These arrangements of nature it is, 
in most cases, highly desirable substantially to maintain, when 
such regions become the seat of organized commonwealths. 
It is, therefore, a matter of the first importance, that, in 
commencing the process of fitting them for permanent civil¬ 
ized occupation, the transforming operations should be so con¬ 
ducted as not unnecessarily to derange and destroy what, in too 
many cases, it is beyond the power of man to rectify or restore. 
also to the animals that preyed upon them. Hence the insect and the 
gnawing quadruped are allowed to increase, from the expulsion of the 
police which, in the natural wood, prevent their excessive multiplication, 
and they become destructive to the forest because they are driven to the 
living tree for nutriment and cover. The forest of Fontainebleau is almost 
wholly without birds, and their absence is ascribed by some writers to 
the want of water, which, in the thirsty sands of that wood, does not 
gather into running brooks; but the want of undergrowth is perhaps 
an equally good reason for their scarcity. In a wood of spontaneous 
growth, ordered and governed by nature, the squirrel does not attack 
trees, or at least the injury he may do is too trifling to be perceptible, but 
he is a formidable enemy to the plantation. “ The squirrels bite the cones 
of the pine and consume the seed which might serve to restock the wood; 
they do still more mischief by gnawing off, near the leading shoot, a strip 
of bark, and thus often completely girdling the tree. Trees so injured 
must be felled, as they would never acquire a vigorous growth. The 
squirrel is especially destructive to the pine in Sologne, where he gnaws 
the hark of trees twenty or twenty-five years old.” But even here, nature 
sometimes provides a compensation, by making the appetite of this quad¬ 
ruped serve to prevent an excessive production of seed cones, which tends 
to obstruct the due growth of the leading shoot. “ In some of the pineries 
of Brittany which produce cones so abundantly as to strangle the develop¬ 
ment of the leading shoot of the maritime pine, it has been observed that 
the pines are most vigorous where the squirrels are most numerous, a result 
attributed to the repression of the cones by this rodent.”— Boitel, Mise en 
valeur des Terres pauvres , p. 50. 
