EARTH ORIGINALLY WOODED. 
129 
exceptions, already covered with a forest growth when it first 
became the home of man. This we infer from the extensive 
vegetable remains—trunks, branches, roots, fruits, seeds, and 
leaves of trees—so often found in conjunction with works of 
primitive art, in the boggy soil of districts where no forests 
appear to have existed within the eras through which written 
annals reach ; from ancient historical records, which prove that 
large provinces, where the earth has long been wholly bare of 
trees, were clothed with vast and almost unbroken woods 
when first made known to Greek and Roman civilization; * 
and from the state of much of North and of South America 
when they were discovered and colonized by the European 
race.f 
These evidences are strengthened by observation of the 
natural economy of our own time; for, whenever a tract of 
country, once inhabited and cultivated by man, is abandoned 
by him and by domestic animals,^; and surrendered to the 
* The recorded evidence in support of the proposition in the text has 
been collected by L. F. Alfred Maury, in his Histoire des grandes Forets de 
la Gaule et de Vancienne France , and by Becquerel, in his important work, 
Des climats et de VInfluence qu'exercent les Sols boises et non boises , livre ii, 
chap, i to iv. 
We may rank among historical evidences on this point, if not tech¬ 
nically among historical records, old geographical names and terminations 
etymologically indicating forest or grove, which are so common in many 
parts of the Eastern Continent now entirely stripped of woods—such as, 
in Southern Europe, Breuil, Broglio, Brolio, Brolo; in Northern, Briihl, 
-wald, -wold, -wood, -shaw, -skcg, and -skov. 
i The island of Madeira, whose noble forests were devastated by fire 
not long after its colonization by European settlers, derives its name from 
the Portuguese word for wood. 
1 Browsing animals, and most of all the goat, are considered by foresters 
as more injurious to the growth of young trees, and, therefore, to the repro¬ 
duction of the forest, than almost any other destructive cause. “Accord¬ 
ing to Beatson’s Saint Helena , introductory chapter, and Darwin’s Journal 
of Researches in Geology and Natural History , pp. 582, 583,” says Emsmann, 
in the notes to his translation of Foissac, p. 654, “it was the goats which 
destroyed the beautiful forests that, three hundred and fifty years ago, 
covered a continuous surface of not less than two thousand acres in the 
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