136 
BURNING OF FORESTS. 
for tlie construction of dwellings, boats, and the implements 
of his rude agriculture and handicrafts. Windfalls would 
furnish a thin population with a sufficient supply of such 
material, and if occasionally a growing tree was cat, the injury 
to the forest would be too insignificant to be at all appreciable. 
The accidental escape and spread of fire, or, possibly, the 
combustion of forests by lightning, must have first suggested 
the advantages to be derived from the removal of too abun- 
O 
dant and extensive woods, and, at the same time, have pointed 
out a means by which a large tract of surface could readily be 
cleared of much of this natural incumbrance. As soon as agri¬ 
culture had commenced at all, it would be observed that the 
growth of cultivated plants, as well as of many species of wild 
vegetation, was particularly rapid and luxuriant on soils which 
had been burned over, and thus a new stimulus would be 
given to the practice of destroying the woods by fire, as a 
means of both extending the open grounds, and making the 
acquisition of a yet more productive soil. After a few har¬ 
vests had exhausted the first rank fertility of the virgin mould, 
or when weeds and briers and the sprouting roots of the trees 
had begun to choke the crops of the half-subdued soil, the 
ground would be abandoned for new fields won from the 
forest by the same means, and the deserted plain or hillock 
would soon clothe itself anew with shrubs and trees, to be 
again subjected to the same destructive process, and again sur¬ 
rendered to the restorative powers of vegetable nature.* This 
* In many parts of the North American States, the first white settlers 
found extensive tracts of thin woods, of a very park-like character, called 
“ oak openings,” from the predominance of different species of that tree 
upon them. These were the semi-artificial pasture grounds of the Indians, 
brought into that state, and so kept, by partial clearing, and by the annual 
burning of the grass. The object of this operation was to attract the deer 
to the fresh herbage which sprang up after the fire. The oaks bore the 
annual scorching, at least for a certain time ; but if it had been indefinitely 
continued, they would very probably have been destroyed at last. The 
soil would have then been much in the prairie condition, and. would have 
needed nothing but grazing for a long succession of years to make the re¬ 
semblance perfect. That the annual fires alone occasioned the peculiar 
