The earth must have been originally covered with forest, like the 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, in lofty and precipitous mountains, that serve not only to perpetuate moisture for the supply of rain to the neighboring countries, but contribute also to preserve the timber in their inaccessible ravines.  Were it not for this safeguard of mountains, the South of Europe would ere this have become a desert, from the destruction of its forests, like Sahara, whose barrenness was anciently produced by the same cause.

Most of the territory of North America is still comparatively a wilderness; but in the United States the forests have been so extensively invaded, that they seldom exhibit any distinct outlines, and few of them possess the character of unique assemblages.  They are but scattered fragments of the original forest, through which the settlers have made their irregular progress from east to west, diversifying it with roads, farms, and villages.  The recent clearings are palisaded by tall trees, exhibiting a naked outline of skeleton