FOREST FURNISHES NO FOOD FOR MAN. 
133 
thrive well on dry and sandy soils, and lie spares no tree, tlie 
branches of which are within his reach, except, if I remember 
right, the tamarisk that produces manna. Young trees sprout 
plentifully around the springs, and along the winter water¬ 
courses of the desert, and these are just the halting stations of 
the caravans and their routes of travel. In the shade of these 
trees, annual grasses and perennial shrubs shoot up, but are 
mown down by the hungry cattle of the Bedouin, as fast as 
they grow. A few years of undisturbed vegetation would 
suffice to cover such points with groves, and these would grad¬ 
ually extend themselves over soils where now scarcely any 
green thing but the bitter colocyntli and the poisonous fox¬ 
glove is ever seen. 
The Forest does not Furnish Food for Man . 
In a region absolutely covered with trees, human life could 
not long be sustained, for want of animal and vegetable food. 
The depths of the forest seldom furnish either bulb or fruit 
suited to the nourishment of man ; and the fowls and beasts 
on which he feeds are scarcely seen except upon the margin 
of the wood, for here only grow the shrubs and grasses, and 
here only are found the seeds and insects, which form the sus¬ 
tenance of the non-carnivorous birds and quadrupeds." 
* Except upon the hanks of rivers or of lakes, the woods of the interior 
of North America, far from the habitations of man, are almost destitute of 
animal life. Dr. Newberry, describing the vast forests of the yellow pine 
of the West, Finns ponderosa , remarks : “ In the arid and desert regions 
of the interior basin, we made whole days’ marches in forests of yellow 
pine, of which neither the monotony was broken by other forms of vege¬ 
tation, nor its stillness by the flutter of a bird or the hum of an insect.”— 
Pacific Railroad Report , vol. vi, 1857. Dr. Newbeeey’s Report on Botany , 
p. 87. 
The wild fruit and nut trees, the Canada plum, the cherries, the many 
species of walnut, the butternut, the hazel, yield very little, frequently 
nothing, so long as they grow in the woods ; and it is only when the trees 
around them are cut down, or when they grow in pastures, that they be¬ 
come productive. The berries, too—the strawberry, the blackberry, the 
