316 
THE TAILLTS OR COPPICE. 
have sprouted near them. If domestic animals of any species 
are allowed to roam in the wood, they browse upon the ter¬ 
minal buds and the tender branches, thereby stunting, if they 
do not kill, the young trees, and depriving them of all beauty 
and vigor of growth. The evergreens, once cut, do not shoot 
up again,* and the mixed character of the forest—in many 
respects an important advantage, if not an indispensable con¬ 
dition of growth—is lost; f and besides this, large wood of 
* It has been recently stated, upon the evidence of the Government 
foresters of Greece, and of the queen’s gardener, that a large wood has 
been discovered in Arcadia, consisting of a fir which has the property of 
sending up both vertical and lateral shoots from the stump of felled trees 
and forming a new crown. It was at first supposed that this forest grew 
only on the “mountains,” of which the hero of About’s most amusing story, 
Le Roi des Montagues , was “king; ” but it is now said that small stumps, 
with the shoots attached, have been sent to Germany, and recognized by 
able botanists as true natural products. 
t Natural forests are rarely, if ever, composed of trees of a single 
species, and experience has shown that oaks and other broad-leaved trees, 
planted as artificial woods, require to be mixed, or associated with others 
of different habits. 
In the forest of Fontainebleau, “oaks, mingled with beeches in due 
proportion,” says Clav6, “may arrive at the age of five or six hundred 
years in full vigor, and attain dimensions which I have never seen sur¬ 
passed ; when, however, they are wholly unmixed with other trees, they 
begin to decay and die at the top, at the age of forty or fifty years, like 
men, old before their time, weary of the world, and longing only to quit 
it. This has been observed in most of the oak plantations of which I have 
spoken, and they have not been able to attain to full growth. When the 
vegetation was perceived to languish, they were cut, in the hope that this 
operation would restore their vigor, and that the new shoots would suc¬ 
ceed better than the original trees; and, in fact, they seemed to be recover¬ 
ing for the first few years. But the shoots were soon attacked by the 
same decay, and the operation had to be renewed at shorter and shorter 
intervals, until at last it was found necessary to treat as coppices planta¬ 
tions originally designed for the full-growth system. Nor was this all: 
the soil, periodically bared by these cuttings, became impoverished, and 
less and less suited to the growth of the oak. * * * It was then pro¬ 
posed to introduce the pine and plant with it the vacancies and glades. 
* * * By this means, the forest was saved from the ruin which threat¬ 
ened it, and now more than 10,000 acres of pines, from fifteen to thirty 
