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up to the height of ten or eleven feet, and are all in full bloom. The road or path is hemmed in, and the view is completely obstructed. The thistles are so close together, and so strong, that they are perfectly impenetrable. Captain Head, in his journey across the Pampas, says: "it is really possible that an invading army, unacquainted with this country, might be imprisoned by these thistles before they had time to escape from them." We have mentioned these facts to shew the almost universal luxuriance of natural vegetation: generally, this luxuriance produces the most beautiful and majestic objects of the vegetable kingdom, trees. A country without wood is always disagreeable; and thus the inhabitants of bleak regions, possessing no timber, are considered peculiarly unfortunate. On the other hand, the extreme abundance of trees, in many parts of the earth, renders it one of the great labours of man to clear the ground of them, that he may be able to raise food by cultivation. The progress of civilization has thus a natural tendency to diminish the forests of the world. The Britons, the Gauls, and the Germans, in those states of society which have been described by Cæsar and Tacitus, lived almost wholly in the woods, which supplied the principal wants of a rude people; but as the arts of life made advances, through communication with more refined nations, these people permitted the wolves and bears to occupy the forests-associated together in towns

and cultivated the open country. As population increased, more land was required for culture than the plains afforded; and then the forests were subjected to the axe, and their spontaneous produce was succeeded by regular tillage. This is the progress of man in all woody countries.

For several centuries the forests of England were much neglected. Many of them were royal domains;

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but as the inhabitants within a forest generally had customary rights which were considered irreconcileable with much improvement, very little young timber was produced. Within the last twenty years, some of the most extensive of these ancient appendages of the crown have been disafforested—that is, a part has been assigned to the inhabitants of the district, and the other part has been inclosed by the The Commissioners of Woods and Forests have important duties to perform, and not the least important is that of providing a proper succession of timber for building ships. We have seen a calculation, in which it is shewn that a first-rate ship of the line contains three thousand loads of timber, and that this quantity could not be grown on a less surface than fifty acres. To maintain, therefore, an abundant supply of timber fit for naval purposes, is not an easy or a trivial matter.

At the time when Gilpin published his "Forest Scenery," about thirty years ago, it was considered that eleven forests had alone preserved their rights, out of seventy-seven which are enumerated in an account of the land revenues of the crown, published by Mr. St. John. These eleven were- -Windsor, Waltham, Dean, Rockingham, Whittlewood, Salcey, Sherwood, Whichwood, New-forest, Bere, and Walmer. Of these the greater number, as we have already stated, have now been disafforested. The cruel and iniquitous usurpations called forest law, which had been in former times such a source of oppression to the people, have long since fallen into disuse,— although, till within these few years, some of the forms of those laws were kept up, particularly in the New-forest and the forest of Dean. The principle of these despotic laws, according to Manwood, a legal writer on the subject, was this:-" It is allowed to our sovereign lord the king, in respect of his con

tinual care and labour for the preservation of the whole realm, among other privileges, this prerogative, to have his places of recreation and pastime, wheresoever he will appoint. For as it is at the liberty and pleasure of his grace to secure the wild beasts and the game to himself, for his only delight and pleasure, so he may also at his will and pleasure make a forest for them to abide in." In this way more than an eighth of the whole kingdom was made forest for the king's pastime; and the most vexatious and arbitrary regulations were enforced for the purpose of preserving the game. The grievance at length was put down by the spirit of the people.

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The publication of his Sylva, by Evelyn, gave a considerable impulse to planting in the time of Charles II.; but in the next century that duty was much neglected by the landed proprietors of this country. There is a selfish feeling, that the planter of an elm or an oak does not reap such an immediate profit from it himself, as will compensate for the expense and trouble of raising it. This is an extremely narrow principle, which, fortunately, the rich are beginning to be ashamed of. It is a positive duty of a landed proprietor who cuts down the tree which his grandfather planted, to put a young one into the ground, as a legacy to his own grand-children: he will otherwise leave the world worse than he found it. Sir Walter Scott, who is himself a considerable planter, has eloquently denounced that contracted feeling which prevents proprietors thus improving their estates, because the profits of plantations make a tardy and distant return; and we cannot better conclude than with a short passage from the essay in which he enforces the duty of planting waste lands:

The indifference to this great rural improvement arises, we have reason to believe, not so much out

of the actual lucre of gain as the fatal vis inertiæ that indolence which induces the lords of the soil to be satisfied with what they can obtain from it by immediate rent, rather than encounter the expense and trouble of attempting the modes of amelioration which require immediate expense-and, what is, perhaps, more grudged by the first-born of Egypt-a little future attention. To such we can only say that improvement by plantation is at once the easiest, the cheapest, and the least precarious mode of increasing the immediate value, as well as the future income, of their estates; and that therefore it is we exhort them to take to heart the exhortation of the dying Scotch laird to his son:- Be aye sticking in a tree, Jock-it will be growing whilst you are sleeping.""

The following Table of the Duties paid upon foreign timber, in 1827, will point out the vast extent of the commerce of the United Kingdom in this article.

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In 1827, the number of loads of timber exported from British America was 343,203; and from the Baltic, 173,382. Total loads imported, 516,585.

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