THE MANAGEMENT OF EPPING FOREST. 65
Forest in all parts and at various seasons. (Signed) W. SCHLICH, A. D. Web-
ster, W. Robinson, James Anderson."
Mr. Smith : I will withdraw it with pleasure ; T would not say anything
offensive to anyone, but especially to Mr. Buxton, who has done more for the
Forest than any man living. We have been successful in putting off destruction
for one season : I hope we shall be successful in putting it off for ten seasons.8
The President said that in consequence of the expression of opinion by the
preceding speakers he would put it to the meeting whether a resolution should be
put before them or not. On a vote being taken, it was in favour of a resolution
being submitted.
Professor Boulger, in rising to move a resolution, as reference had been made
to opinions formerly expressed by him and also to consistency, said that he was
unaware whether the Conservators were at all solicitous as to a charge of incon-
sistency, but that for his part he was not. Few people had been more outspoken
in their comments on the action of the Conservators in the past than he had
himself, and he would frankly admit that his criticisms, unlike those of his friend,
Professor Meldola, had been directed not only against the threatened railway, but
also against various points of forest management. He had blamed the thinning
in the past as excessive as well as injudicious, but the result forced him to the
admission that he had to some extent been wrong ; in the case of Lord's Bushes,
for instance, entirely wrong. He had the less compunction in making this
admission because, like the Conservators, fourteen years ago he had no precedent
to go upon. He would be the last person to find serious fault with the drafting
of the Epping Forest Act by one whom they were all glad was now in the House of
Lords ; but, when that Act laid down that the natural condition of the Forest was
to be maintained, he ventured to submit that it enjoined an impossibility, since
there was no natural condition to maintain. The Conservators had the un-
speakably difficult task of regenerating a forest all but destroyed by the vandalism
of generations, and they had no precedents to guide them in their action. Such
action must, therefore, be very largely experimental, and it was also a process
demanding a considerable term of years. It was unreasonable to expect to see
the Forest made beautiful in a year or two, and at the same time to allow
nothing to be done to bring about such a result. He was far from endorsing all
that the Conservators had done or all the opinions they had expressed. He
differed from their friend, Mr. E. N. Buxton, for instance, as to the possibility
of regenerating the Forest by what he might term successive nurses—thorn
springing up through heather, and forest trees through the thorn—as he did not
believe that thorn could grow from seed among heather, nor could any of their
trees do so except the birch. The thinning again may have been excessive in
some places—he thought it had ; but of late years he had more and more
confined his criticism—for the last three years entirely—to complaints as to the
injudicious selection of the trees felled. There were still many parts of the
Forest where much more thinning was required and, though the sacrifice of so
many fine young oaks was, no doubt, a painful necessity, a private examination
had convinced him that even the much debated oaks in Bury Wood had been
rightly marked for felling. He had been very pleased to see that day what had
been done in Great Monk Wood, with the result of adding greatly to its beauty,
as he had urged that action a good many years ago, and had been met by the
8 Although both Mr. Lindley and Mr. Smith were applied to for corrected copies of their
speeches, no such copies have reached us. We therefore quote the reports in "The Essex Times,"
which we presume these gentlemen consider to correctly represent the views they expressed.
—Ed.
F