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 and the Til of Madeira have an unpleasant smell.
More important in practice are the differences in the hardness and weight of wood. The Ironwood of India cannot be worked, as its hardness blunts every tool. It requires a pressure of something like 16,000 lb. to force a square-inch punch to a depth of one-twentieth of an inch in Lignum vitæ. Even Hickory and Oak (if of good quality) require a pressure of 3200 lb. to the square inch to do this. On the other hand the Cotton tree of India (Bombax malabaricum) has exceedingly soft wood. It is quite easy to drive a pin into the wood with the fingers.
Some woods are far too heavy to float: many tropical woods are especially very weighty. Perhaps the Black Ironwood, of which a cubic foot weighs 85 lb., is the heaviest of all. But the same volume of Poplar, Willow, or Spruce does not weigh more than 24 lb.
There are many ancient and modern instances of the extraordinary way in which timber lasts when at all carefully looked after. Thus the Cedar which "Hiram rafted down" to make the temple of Solomon (probably Cedar of Lebanon) seems to have been extraordinarily durable. Pliny says that the beams of the temple of Apollo at Utica were sound 1200 years after they were erected.
Cypress wood (Cupressus sempervirens) was often used to make chests for clothes because the clothes moth cannot penetrate it, and it also lasts a very long time. There is a chest of this wood in the South Kensington Museum which is 600-700 years old. The Cypresswood gates of Constantinople were eleven centuries old when they were destroyed by the Turks in 1453. The fleet of Alexander the Great, and the bridge over the Euphrates built by Semiramis, were made of Cypress. This wood seems to have been of extraordinary value to the ancients, and was used for mummy cases in Egypt, for coffins by the Popes, as well as for harps and organ pipes.22
Perhaps the most valuable woods are Box, which is used for woodcuts, and Walnut, which used to be highly prized for gun-stocks, as much as £600 having been paid for a single tree.
But the most interesting histories of trade in timber belong to the commoner and more usual woods. The great woods of Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) cover 14,000 square miles of Australia, but they are being rapidly cut down and sawn up into small blocks to be carried right across the world in order to form the pavement which London cabmen and cab-horses prefer to any other.
One remembers also the beautiful Deodar forests of Afghanistan, and the Himalayas. Logs of deodar were floated down the rivers to form bridges or temple pillars in Srinagar, the capital of far Cashmere. Nowadays great "slides" are made, winding down into the valleys from the recesses of the hills. When winter approaches, water is sprinkled on the logs which make the slide; this freezes and forms a slippery descending surface, down which the deodar timber rushes till it reaches the low ground, where it is cut up into railway sleepers and takes part in the civilizing of India.
The fragrant Teak has an oleoresin which prevents the destructive white ants from attacking it; it is the most valuable timber for shipbuilding, and grows in many places of India, Malaysia, Java, and Sumatra. It floats down the rivers of Burmah, coming from the most remote hill jungles, and elephants are commonly used at the ports to gather the trunks from the water and pile them ready for shipment.
The Birch is carried all the way from Russia to Assam and Ceylon, in order to make the chests in which tea is sent to England and Russia (native Indian woods are also used). It is also used in the distillation of Scotch whisky, for smoking herrings and hams, for clogs, baskets, tanning, dyeing, cordage, and even for making bread.
But one of the most curious and interesting sights in any seaport is sure to be an old white Norwegian or Swedish sailing barque or brigantine. She will have a battered, storm-beaten appearance, and is yet obviously a comfortable home. The windows of the deck-house may be picked out with a lurid green. The tall, slowmoving, white-bearded skipper and his wife, children, and crew, not to speak of a dog and cats, have their home on this veteran "windjammer." She carries them from some unpronounceable, never-heard-of port in Norway, all over the world. You may see her discharging a cargo of deal plank, through the clumsy square holes in her stern, in a forgotten Fifeshire village, in Madagascar, in China, or in the Straits of Magellan. All her life she is engaged in this work, and her life is an exceedingly long one, to judge from the Viking lines on which she is built.
Moreover, her work is done so economically that it used to be much cheaper to use her cargo in Capetown than to utilize the beautiful forests of the Knysna and King Williamstown.
But there are not wanting signs that the forests of Norway, of Sweden, and even those of the United States, are doomed.
It is said that seven acres of primeval forest are cut down to supply the wood which is used up in making the paper required for one day's issue of a certain New York journal. What a responsibility and a source of legitimate pride this must be to the journalists! Let us hope that the end justifies the means.
Boulger calculates that in 1884 all the available timber from 4,131,520 acres of Californian Redwood was used in making the sleepers of the railways then existing in the United States.
He finds that no less than 18,000,000 acres of forest are necessary to keep up the supply of sleepers for the old lines and to build new ones.
So that, if we remember the wood required for paper, firewood, and the thousand other important requisites of civilized man, the United States must soon exhaust her supply and import wood.
Then will come the opportunity of British North America. The Southern forest of Canada, which extended for 2000 miles from the Atlantic to the head of the St. Lawrence, has indeed gone or is disappearing into pulpwood and timber, but there is still the great Northern forest from the Straits of Belleisle to Alaska (4000 miles long and 700 miles broad), and in addition the beautiful forests of Douglas Spruce and other trees in British Columbia covering 285,000 square miles.
It is the wood-pulp industry which is at present destroying the Canadian forests. The penny and halfpenny papers, and indeed most books nowadays, are made of paper produced by disintegrating wood: it is cheap, and can be produced in huge quantities; nevertheless it is disquieting to reflect that probably nineteen-twentieths of the literary output of the twentieth century will be dust and ashes just about the same time (some fifty years) that the writers who produced it reach the same state.23
Yet, considering the amount daily produced to-day, the future readers of fifty years hence who are now in their cradles, may consider this a merciful dispensation of Providence.
One very curious use of wood may be mentioned here. Near Assouan, on the First Cataract of the Nile, one discovers broken granite or syenite needles, which had been intended by the ancient Egyptians for monuments. Where the broken pillar lies, there are rows of wedge-shaped holes cut in the rock.
They used to drive in wedges of dry wood and then wet them with water. The expansion of the wood split the rock, though this is hard granite or syenite. Very often the process failed because the stone cracked. The same method is said to be still used in some quarries.
The destruction of the forest is really necessary. Most of the corn land and rich pasture of the world has been at one time forest. It could scarcely be such fertile soil if it had not been for the many years during which leaf-mould fell on it, and the roots broke up and penetrated the subsoil below. Canada, Russia, and the United States are now passing through the same experience as that of Great Britain in the time of the Romans, Saxons, and Danes.
But there is terrible waste by fire.
When the trees become dry and withered in the height of summer in either India or the United States, some careless tramp may throw aside a lighted match. If a fire once starts, it spreads with enormous rapidity; great clouds of smoke roll over the surrounding country, and every village sounds the alarm. Everybody rushes to help and try to stop the conflagration, or if too late hurriedly saves whatever he can get of his possessions. His log hut and all the accumulations of years of saving may be turned into a heap of ashes in a very few minutes.
But the crackling of the leaves and the flaming twigs and scorching bark make such a volume of fire that nothing which man can do is of any avail.
Of course every beast, every bird and insect is in the greatest possible danger.
This is how a fire in New Zealand has been described by Mr. William Satchell: —24
"For a while it seemed that the battle must go to the wind, the fiery monster withdrew, lay hidden, roaring angrily in the dry heart of the woods; then insidiously he stretched forth his glittering arms, first one, then another, and locking the shuddering trees in an irresistible embrace, sprang once again erect. In an instant the whole bush from edge to edge became a seething, rocking mass of flames.
"'Fire! Fire!'
"Then, insignificant no longer, transfigured rather beyond all living possibilities of loveliness, the bush stood revealed to its centre. It became less a fire than an incandescence, waxing in brilliance to the point when, as it seemed, it must perforce burst into indistinguishable flame. Every leaf and twig of that fairy forest was wrought and hammered in virgin gold, every branch and trunk was a carved miracle of burnished copper. And from the golden leaves to the golden floor, floatingly or swiftly, there fell an unceasing rain of crimson flame petals, gorgeous flame fruits. Depth after depth stood revealed, each transcending the last in loveliness. And as the eye sought to penetrate those magic interiors there seemed to open out yet farther vistas, beyond belief beautiful, as of the streets of a city incorruptible, walled and towered, lost in the light of a golden incomparable star."
"'Fire! Fire!'
"In the face of that vision of glory the cry rang out with all the ineptitude and inappropriateness of the human weakling. On one side the titanic forces of nature, inexorable, eternal; on the other the man, frail of body, the creature of an hour, matching himself against them.
"'Fire! Fire!'
"Sheltering his face from the insufferable heat, the Swede hammered madly at the solid house-door. At the back, now utterly unapproachable, the kitchen, the roof, and a part of the main wall were already in flames. A few minutes – five at the most – would complete the demolition of the house. To right and left the great trees one after another went off like rockets, the roar of their burning foliage shaking the very earth. A deafening crashing of falling timber came at intervals from the bush beyond."
In some countries the destruction of the forests has had a very serious effect on the climate. The rain which falls upon a forest is partly absorbed by the leaves, and but a very small part of it is carried off by burns and streams: most sinks down into the forest soil, and is only gradually given back again after being taken in by the tree roots and evaporated by the leaves.
But bare hills denuded of wood allow most of their rain to rush down to the sea in dangerous spates of the rivers and burns, and then the ground becomes afterwards very dry and burnt up. There are very many countries now barren and desolate because they have been robbed of the beautiful forests which once covered the springheads and mountain valleys.
Perhaps Palestine is one of the worst instances. But it is when we remember Babylon, Nineveh, and all the cities of the coast of Asia Minor, as they were even a thousand years ago, and compare their present barren, desolate condition, that the full meaning of mountain forests becomes clear.
Where once there were thriving, prosperous cities with enormous populations, now the goats graze or a few miserable peasants carefully husband the water of a few miserable streams. The same thing has happened in Mauritius, in the Cape Verde and Canary Islands, and in many other places.
But men are now beginning to see how dangerous the destruction of forests may be, and in many countries and especially in Britain, new forests are being planted. Perhaps in time we may grow in Britain so much timber that we shall gain something like £32,000,000 a year, which is what we spend on imported woods.
At present plover, whaups, snipe, and grouse, or useless red deer, inhabit what was once the Caledonian forest, and every thousand acres of such land nowadays supports perhaps one shepherd and half a gamekeeper. But when it is planted again with woodlands it will afford a living to at least ten foresters, and surely a whole gamekeeper as well.
In the lowlands of Scotland and in England one often discovers, in walking over the hills, remains of cottages and farmhouses which have now vanished. The people have gone into the towns, and the healthy yeomen and farmers' boys have become weak-chested factory hands and hooligans. Such sites of old farms can often be recognized by a patch of nettles, and especially by eight or nine ash trees. These were always planted near the houses to give a ready supply of wood for spears. The ash, "for nothing ill," as Spenser puts it, would be available also for repairing the handles of tools, carts, etc. Some authorities say that it was the law of Scotland that these eight or nine ash trees should be planted at every "farmtoon."
So also, when forests began to vanish in England, laws were made to the effect that yew trees should be planted in every village churchyard. Probably this was to ensure a good supply of bows for the English archers, who, like the Scottish spears, were the best soldiers of their kind in Europe.
So that if we try to compare the conditions of man and of the forests in Great Britain from the earliest days, it would be something like this: —
1. When the earliest inhabitants lived on shell-fish, seabirds' eggs, nuts, and fruits, almost the whole country was covered by oak, Scotch fir, or birch forests.
2. When man was a hunter of reindeer and other deer, horses, cattle, and birds, he used much wood for fires and for building his lake dwellings.
3. When man kept herds of swine to eat acorns, black cattle, goats, and ponies, there would be many clearings and a great deal of open wood in which the cattle roamed about.
4. When man grew corn and other plants, the forest vanished altogether. Dr. Johnson said he scarcely saw a tree between Carlisle and Edinburgh. Yet first the King, then the Barons, had their parks and woodlands for preserving game. Moreover, the yews in the churchyards of England, and the ash trees by the Scotch farmtoons and peel-towers, were carefully looked after.
5. When great towns arose, and men became factory hands and steel workers, rich men began to make plantations in the lowlands, and to use the depopulated highlands for grouse moors and deer forests.
6. When men become wiser than they are now, it will be seen that great forests are necessary on all waste-land and barren places, both to keep a healthy country population and because it will pay.