Excerpt from Natural History Rambles: The Woodlands Caesar says, what the Britons call a town, is a tract of woody country, surrounded by a high bank and a ditch, for the security of themselves and cattle against the incursions of their enemies, and Strabo remarks that the forests of the Britons are their cities for when they have inclosed a very large circuit with felled trees, they build within it houses for them selves, and hovels for their cattle. Thus the early records of the Briton associate him with a love for trees and woods. Gradually, but continually, during the past thousand years, the original forests have diminished; partly to furnish timber for houses and ships, partly being en closed and brought under cultivation, but chiefly to meet the wants of a rapidly increasing population. On the other hand, fruit-trees, in orchards and gardens, large parks with ornamental trees, young plantations, and other forms of vegetation, having to a large extent replaced the forests, less disastrous consequences have followed their diminution than have resulted in many other countries, as for example in Spain, as well as some portions of France. Forests, which are distributed so universally over the surface of the globe, and are recklessly destroyed in newly-colonized countries, without regard to con sequences, have important functions to perform in the economy of nature. It is only in most recent times that man has awakened to the consciousness, that in the wholesale destruction of forests the entire aspect of a country is changed, equilibrium disturbed, and the advent of desolation threatened. The destruction of forests in the Island of Cyprus, in order to furnish its celebrated timber to the Romans, jews, and other nations, has reduced a paradise to a comparative wilderness 3 and the progress of similar destruction in India aroused the Government to adopt a complete system of forest conservancy in order to avert the threatened evil. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.