American continent in the time of Columbus. This has in all cases
disappeared, as population has increased; and groves, fragments of
wild-wood, small groups, and single trees have taken its place. Great
Britain, once renowned for its extensive woods, now exhibits only
smaller assemblages, chiefly of an artificial character, which are more
interesting to the landscape-gardener than to the lover of Nature's
primitive charms. Parks, belts, arboretums, and clipped hedge-rows,
however useful as contributing to pleasure, convenience, or science, are
not the most interesting features of wood-scenery. But the customs of
the English nobility, while they have artificialized all the fairest
scenes in the country, and ruined them for the eyes of the poet or the
painter, have been the means of preserving some valuable forests,
which under other circumstances would have been utterly destroyed.
A deer-forest belonging to the Duke of Athol comprises four hundred
thousand acres; the forest of Farquharson contains one hundred and
thirty thousand acres; and several others of smaller extent are still
preserved as deer-parks. Thus do the luxuries of the rich tend, in
some instances, to preserve those natural objects of which they are in
general the principal destroyers.

Immense forests still overspread a great part of Northern Russia,
through which it has been asserted that a squirrel might traverse
hundreds of miles, without touching the ground, by leaping from tree to
tree. Since the general adoption of railroad travelling, however, great
ravages have been made in these forests, and not many years will be
required to reduce them to fragments. In the South of Europe a great
part of the territory is barren of woods, and the climate has suffered
from this cause, which has diminished the bulk of the streams and
increased the severity of droughts. But Nature has established a partial
remedy for the evil arising from the imprudent destruction of forests,