222 
THE FOREST IN ENGLAND. 
wearie of the world, or the world of me.” * Evelyn’s “ Silva,” 
the first edition of which appeared in 1664, rendered an ex¬ 
tremely important service to the cause of the woods, and there 
is no doubt that the ornamental plantations in which England 
far surpasses all other countries, are, in some measure, the 
* Holinshed, reprint of 1807, i, pp. 357, 358. It is evident from this 
passage, and from another on page 397 of the same volume, that, though 
sea coal was largely exported to the Continent, it had not yet come into gen¬ 
eral use in England. It is a question of much interest, when coal was first 
employed in England for fuel. I can find no evidence that it was used as a 
combustible until more than a century after the Norman conquest. It has 
been said that it was known to the Anglo-Saxon population, but I am ac¬ 
quainted with no passage in the literature of that people which proves 
this. The dictionaries explain the Anglo-Saxon word gratfa by sea coal. 
I have met with this word in no Anglo-Saxon work, except in the Chron¬ 
icle , a. d. 852, from a manuscript certainly not older than the twelfth cen¬ 
tury, and in that passage it may as probably mean peat as coal, and quite 
as probably something else as either. Coal is not mentioned in King Al¬ 
fred’s Bede, in Glanville, or in Robert of Gloucester, though all these 
writers speak of jet as found in England, and are full in their enumeration 
of the mineral products of the island. 
England was anciently remarkable for its forests, but Ca>sar says it 
wanted th zfagus and the abies. There can be no doubt that fag us means 
the beech, which, as the remains in the Danish peat mosses show, is a tree 
of late introduction into Denmark, where it succeeded the fir, a tree not now 
native to that country. The succession of forest crops seems to have been 
the same in England; for Harrison, p. 359, speaks of the “ great store of 
firre ” found lying “ at their whole lengths ” in the “ fens and marises ” 
of Lancashire and other counties, where not even bushes grew in his time. 
We cannot be sure what species of evergreen Cassar intended by abies. 
The popular designations of spike-leaved trees are always more vague and 
uncertain in their application than those of broad-leaved trees. Pinus , 
pine , has been very loosely employed even in botanical nomenclature, and 
Kiefer , Fichte , and Tanne are often confounded in German. —Rossmassler, 
Der Waif pp. 256, 289, 324. If it were certain that the abies of Caesar 
was the fir formerly and still found in peat mosses, and that he was right 
in denying the existence of the beech in England in his time, the observa¬ 
tion would be very important, because it would fix a date at which the fir 
had become extinct, and the beech had not yet appeared in the island. 
The English oak, though strong and durable, was not considered gen¬ 
erally suitable for finer work in the sixteenth century. There were, how- 
