oats: it is, therefore, not only on account of the sacred character formerly attached to the oak, but also because of the value of its fruit, that nearly all the millennial trees of England belong to that genus.
The Norman kings protected the forests for the chase, but this was looked upon by the subjugated Saxons as the most oppressive act of their conquerors. Yet to Saxon Ina and Norman William the Englishman of the present time is indebted for the numerous fine old trees that remain the glory and pride of the British isles.
In the reign of Henry the Seventh, we are told, forests, principally of oak and beech, covered one-third of all England. Tusser, who wrote about the year 1562, complains that "men were more studious to cut down than to plant;" and it was probably about this period that clearing for cultivation became universal, as the increasing manufactures and the introduction of garden vegetables from the Continent testify.
The destruction must have been quite as rapid as in America, judging from the lamentations of Evelyn, who was called upon, only a century later, to repair the great waste of woods in England. Thus we find that, until the beginning of our own American history, no special apprehension was felt about the scarcity of wood in the mother-country; but from the time of the appointment of royal governors in the colonies, one of the grievances most frequently mentioned was the prerogative claimed by the king of taking the finest trees in the forests of the New World for the royal navy. The colonists were glad to freight ships for home with their superabundant timber; but, true to the independent spirit which had exiled them, they protested against the monarch's right to take it without pay. The surveyor of the crown, who went through the forests marking the broad arrow of his master on the finest trees, was an unpopular character; and our ancestors showed the same spirit in protesting against this unjust claim as at a later period against the stamp act and tea tax. The grand white pine of the northern woods was often left to decay, because, the king's broad arrow once placed on it, no meaner hand might dare to appropriate it. This was a standing grievance between the colonists and the king, and in the time of Governor Shute, about 1700, this popular feeling excited much attention, even in England. According to Magna Charta, the monarch had no right to claim a tree on any man's freehold; and wherever land had been granted and occupied by the settlers the royal order was clearly wrong. Our ancestors, learned in the law of their own land, were usually found not only to have justice but right on their side. We wonder now that, amid the almost unbroken forests of New England more than one hundred and fifty years ago, this subject could be the cause of so much ill-feeling toward the home government; but, like Hampden's ship money, it was the principle they protested against.
We have traced the reason why woods were protected by the Saxon kings, by their Norman conquerors, and by the more recent Stuart dynasty, and why our immediate ancestors quarreled with the last of that line in behalf of the glory of the virgin forests of New England; but, although in each and all of these we discern a glimmering of the real question, yet our own republic has shown a wonderful apathy in a matter of such vital importance. No laws have been enacted to stay the woodman's axe, no paternal rewards held out to those who would plant trees; and we seem to be only just awakening to the fact that some efforts should be made to preserve the beautiful forests that remain. In the report of the eighth census, recently published, is the first note of warning and advice sounded by government—of warning, that forests must be preserved—of advice, that trees must be planted. Not only as a source of national wealth is it urged upon the people, but as a grand climatic agent. The legislatures of some of the States are observing with dismay the injury done to their wheat crop and their fruit by
