290 
SMALL FOREST PLANTS. 
vegetated under its protection. Some wood plants are known 
to possess valuable medicinal properties, and experiment may 
show that the number of these is greater than we now suppose. 
Few of them, however, have any other economical value than 
that of furnishing a slender pasturage to cattle allowed to 
roam in the woods; and even this small advantage is far 
more than compensated by the mischief done to the young 
trees by browsing animals. Upon the whole, the importance 
of this class of vegetables, as physic or as food, is not such as 
to furnish a very telling popular argument for the conservation 
of the forest as a necessary means of their perpetuation. More 
potent remedial agents may supply their place in the 7nateria 
medica , and an acre of grass land yields more nutriment for 
cattle than a range of a hundred acres of forest. But he 
whose sympathies with nature have taught him to feel that 
there is a fellowship between all God’s creatures; to love the 
brilliant ore better than the dull ingot, iodic silver and crys¬ 
tallized red copper better than the shillings and the pennies 
forged from them by the coiner’s cunning; a venerable oak 
tree than the brandy cask whose staves are split out from its 
heart wood ; a bed of anemones, hepaticas, or wood violets 
than the leeks and onions which he may grow on the soil they 
have enriched and in the air they made fragrant—he who has 
enjoyed that special training of the heart and intellect which 
can be acquired only in the unviolated sanctuaries of nature, 
“ where man is distant, but God is near ”—will not rashly 
assert his right to extirpate a tribe of harmless vegetables, 
barely because their products neither tickle his palate nor fill 
his pocket; and his regret at the dwindling area of the forest 
solitude will be augmented by the reflection that the nurse¬ 
lings of the woodland perish with the pines, the oaks, and the 
beeches that sheltered them.* 
* Quaint old Valvasor had observed the subduing influence of nature’s 
solitudes. In describing the lonely Canker-Thal, which, though rocky, 
was in his time well wooded with “ fir, larches, beeches, and other trees,” 
he says: “ Gladsomeness and beauty, which dwell in many valleys, may 
not be looked for there. The journey through it is cheerless, melancholy, 
