Humboldt has written an interesting chapter on the primitive forest, but no one has yet described for me the difference between that wild forest which once occupied our oldest townships, and the tame one which I find there to-day.  It is a difference which would be worth attending to.  The civilized man not only clears the land permanently to a great extent, and cultivates open fields, but he tames and cultivates to a certain extent the forest itself.  By his mere presence, almost, he changes the nature of the trees as no other creature does.  The sun and air, and perhaps fire, have been introduced, and grain raised where it stands.  It has lost its wild, damp, and shaggy look, the countless fallen and decaying trees are gone, and consequently that thick coat of moss which lived on them is gone too.  The earth is comparatively bare and smooth and dry.  The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea.  The surface of the ground in the Maine woods is everywhere spongy and saturated with moisture.  I noticed that the plants which cover the forest floor there are such as are commonly confined to swamps with us,—­the Clintonia borealis, orchises, creeping snowberry, and others; and the prevailing aster there is the Aster acuminatus, which with us grows in damp and shady woods.  The asters cordifolias and macrophyllus also are common, asters of little or no color, and sometimes without petals.  I saw no soft, spreading, second-growth white-pines, with smooth bark, acknowledging the presence of the wood-chopper, but even the young white-pines were all tall and slender rough-barked trees.

Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours.  There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot, some widow’s thirds, from which her ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan too, and old bound-marks may be found every forty rods, if you will search.  ’Tis true, the map may inform you that you stand on land granted by the State to some academy, or on Bingham’s purchase; but these names do not impose on you, for you see nothing to remind you of the academy or of Bingham.  What were the “forests” of England to these?  One writer relates of the Isle of Wight, that in Charles the Second’s time “there were woods in the island so complete and extensive, that it is said a squirrel might have travelled in several parts many leagues together on the top of the trees.”  If it were not for the rivers, (and he might go round their heads,) a squirrel could here travel thus the whole breadth of the country.