If it should escape destruction, its
growth will be retarded, and its form will be disfigured. It will have
neither size nor comeliness. It will be cropped by the cattle, and bent
and twisted by the winds; it will be stunted and dwarfed, crooked and
mis-shapen, knotted and gnarled, neither pleasant to the eye, nor good
for timber. Not one in a thousand would ever become a tall, a straight,
and a majestic tree.
Mr. Darwin says, that on some large tracts on which, while they were
unenclosed and unprotected, there was not a tree to be seen, there soon
appeared, after the land was enclosed by a fence, a countless multitude
of fine Scotch firs. The seeds of these trees had been sown by some
means, and they had germinated, and the embryo trees had sprung up; but
the cattle had cropped the tender shoots, or crushed and trampled them
down, and not one had been able to raise its head above the grass or
heather. On looking down and searching carefully among the heather, he
found in one square yard of ground, no fewer than thirty-two small
trees, one of which had been vainly trying to raise its head above the
heather for six and twenty years. After this tract of land had been
enclosed for awhile, it was covered thick with a countless multitude of
fine young trees.
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