The Romance of Plant Life. Elliot George Francis Scott

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СКАЧАТЬ associated with that genial bandit Robin Hood. One huge oak (called the Major) has or used to have a keeper always on guard and paid by Lord Manvers, but there are hundreds of aged oaks all round it. Then there is the Knightwood Oak and some other ancients in the New Forest.

      But it is not certain that these even date so far back as the time of Canute, for so far as the New Forest is concerned, it seems that this was formed either by Canute or by William I. The Saxons seem to have destroyed most of the English forests.

      In Scotland oak forest existed as far north as the Island of Lewis, in Caithness, Dornoch, Cromarty, and along Loch Ness, as well as in every county south of these.19 The deer forests and grouse moors, now desolate, whaup-haunted muir-land and peat mosses, were flourishing woods of magnificent Scots fir at no very distant period. They ascended the hills on the Cairngorms to 1400 or 1500 feet, and in Yorkshire to 2400 feet.20

      Even in remote historical times, such as those of Canute, the forests had become seriously and dangerously destroyed. This king was apparently the first to artificially protect the woods as a hunting preserve. He was followed by William the Conqueror and other sovereigns. The game preserves of the landed proprietors to-day are, of course, the remains of the same custom.

      Fortunately, however, we do not kill poachers or cut off their right hands, and we do not cut off the forepaws of poaching dogs, as used to be done in medieval days.

      This connexion of forests with game no doubt prevented the entire disappearance of wood, but when, as is the case in England, the comfort of pheasants is thought of more importance than the scientific cultivation of forests, the result is often very unfortunate.

      The use and value of timber is, however, too important a matter to take up at the end of a chapter.

      CHAPTER IV

      ON FORESTS

      The forests of the Coal Age – Monkey-puzzle and ginkgo – Wood, its uses, colour, and smell – Lasting properties of wood – Jarrah and deodar – Teak – Uses of birch – Norwegian barques – Destruction of wood in America – Paper from wood pulp – Forest fires – Arid lands once fertile – Britain to be again covered by forests – Vanished country homes – Ashes at farmhouses – Yews in churchyards – History of Man versus Woods in Britain.

      WHAT was the first tree like? That is a very difficult question to answer. Perhaps the first forests were those of the great coal period, of which the remains, buried for untold ages in the earth, became the coal which we now burn.

      The flames and red-glowing heat of a fire are the work of the sunlight which fell in these long-past ages through a steamy, misty atmosphere, upon these weird, grotesque vegetables, unlike anything which now exists upon the earth. Their nearest allies amongst living plants are the little club-mosses which creep over the peat and through the heather in alpine districts.

      Of course no one can say exactly what these coal forests were like. But although some modern authorities have questioned the general accuracy of the descriptions of Heer and others, yet, as they have not given anything better in the way of description, we shall endeavour to describe them according to our own beliefs, and as they probably existed in the Lanarkshire coalfield and other places in Britain.

      In that gloomy mirk of the Carboniferous epoch, an observer (if there had been any) would have dimly perceived huge trunks rising to sixty or eighty feet and divided at the top into a very few branches. All branches were covered over by comparatively quite small leaves. Not a bad idea of the Sigillarias, Lepidodendrons, etc., which made the forest and can be obtained by carefully looking at a pan of Selaginella such as one finds in almost every botanical garden, and imagining this to be eighty feet high. Through the bottomless oozy slime which formed the ground, horizontal runners and roots penetrated in every direction. Great fern-like plants might be observed here and there. Sluggish rivers meandered slowly through these forests, carrying silt and refuse (their deposits are our Cannel coals). In the water and in pools, or perhaps in the mud, were curious waterferns with coiled-up crozier-like leaves. Perhaps horsetail-like plants of huge size might have formed great reed-beds to which those of to-day are as a plantation of one-year-old firs is to a pine forest that has lasted for a century.

      Fishes and crustaceans, or lobster-like creatures, crawled and squattered through the slime, pursued by salamander-like animals with weak limbs and a long tail. Some of these latter were seven to eight feet long. Millipedes, scorpions, beetles and maybugs existed, and huge dragonflies preyed on them.

      But there is one very ancient group of trees, the Araucarias or Monkey-puzzles, which are by no means uncommon even now. The ordinary one (Araucaria imbricata) is often planted in the British Isles, and it has, if you look closely at it, a most peculiar appearance. It is like the sort of tree that a child would draw; it is a clumsy attempt at one, and very different from the exquisite irregularity of the ash or oak.

      Its leaves are especially curious: they cover the branches very closely, and are hard, rigid, and spiny. Its cones, though of the nature of pine-cones, are yet quite unique. The seeds are edible, and used to be an important article of diet to the Indians on the slopes of the Chilian Andes, where monkey-puzzle forests used to exist. This of course is a very out-of-the-way region; other species of Araucaria are found scattered about the world in a most perplexing manner. One kind grows in Norfolk Island, in the Pacific; another occurs in the inner mountainous districts of Brazil; there are some in Australia and others in New Caledonia.

      But in the Jurassic period of geology, in the age of ammonites and gigantic lizards and crocodiles, Araucarias were the regular, ordinary trees. They grew all over Europe, and apparently as far north as Greenland, and, indeed, seem to have existed everywhere.

      Perhaps the spiny leaves discouraged some huge lizard, perhaps Atlantosaurus himself (he was thirty feet high and one hundred feet long), from browsing on its branches. Perhaps the Pterodactyls, those extraordinary bird or bat-like lizards, used to feed upon the seeds of the monkey-puzzle, and carried them in their toothed jaws to New Caledonia, Australia, and Norfolk Island. Other improved types have driven the monkey-puzzles from Europe, Asia, and Africa, and taken their places, but in out-of-the-way districts of South America and Australia they are still able to hold their own.

      An ally of theirs, the Ginkgo or Maidenhair tree, seems to have been extremely common in certain geological periods. To-day it has almost entirely disappeared. A few trees were discovered in certain Chinese temples, where they had been preserved as curiosities for centuries, but it is almost extinct as a wild plant. The Bigtree group (Sequoia p. 47) was a companion of the Ginkgo in its flourishing period. So also were the Sago palms or Cycads. All the ordinary trees, Pines, Oaks, Beeches, and the like, did not appear upon the earth's surface till a much later period.

      The most important economic product of trees is the timber which they furnish. Wood, as we have tried to show in the last chapter, has been always of the greatest importance to mankind. It is easily worked, durable, buoyant, and light, and it is used for all sorts of purposes.

      Silver fir,21 which is accustomed, when growing, to be continually swayed and balanced by the wind, is preferred for the sounding-board of pianos and for the flat part of violins, whilst Sycamore or hard Maple is employed for the back and sides of the latter.

      But there are enormous differences in different kinds of woods. The colour of wood varies from white (Beech), yellow (Satinwood), lemon-yellow and bluish red (sap and heartwood of Barberry), to dark and light brown mottled (Olive), black (Persimmon), and dark brown (Walnut). Some woods have a distinct smell or perfume. Cedarwood, Sandalwood, Deal, and Teak, are all distinctly fragrant. The Stinkwood of South Africa СКАЧАТЬ