84 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.
wood and pasturage for the commoners. The system of lopping
fulfilled these requirements; for while the "loppings" of the
trees had a value for stakes, hurdles, wattle fences and fagots, far
beyond anything we now experience, the young growth of the
trees induced by this periodical cutting was the favourite food of
the deer. The result was not ornamental ; those who do not
remember when, instead of the dense thickets we now see, every
stem was reduced to the appearance of a mop seven feet high,
with every vestige of the underwood cleared away, may study for
themselves how it was done in the little bit of forest in Theydon
Garnon that was not included in the royal forest, and which is
still treated on the old system. But though the results were not
beautiful, this system rendered the life of the six hundred or so
trees per acre far more wholesome than it is now. Every fourteen
years or so the ground was thrown open to sun and air, while the
size of the trees was kept commensurate with the plant-food
obtainable in the limited space available for them.
It is very striking to watch the effect of coppicing in the
woods in the South of England, where the hazel bushes are
periodically cut right down to the ground, and to observe the
natural rotation of vegetation that arises from the process. For
the first two years a profuse growth of hyacinths and wood
anemones covers the ground, afterwards almost disappearing,
and giving place to a more varied flora till the nut bushes again
overshadow the whole and allow but a scanty mossy under-
growth. Nothing could more clearly mark the total change of
the conditions of vegetation in the different stages of the coppic-
ing. A similar periodic change was brought about in the forest
by the lopping giving a fresh start to the growth of any tree
robust enough to stand the treatment.
The vegetation of the forest was thus no natural growth, but
the survival of that fittest to stand this unnatural treatment.
How the particular growth that we find came there is most
difficult to learn. It is almost impossible to imagine any process
of artificial planting, and we must rather look to the inability of
other trees to stand the lopping to explain the presence of those
now in the forest. There is a similar difficulty in explaining the
origin of the hazel coppices of which I have spoken. It is hard
to replace hazel bushes if once rooted out ; whether the idea that
they are the result of squirrels' hoards of nuts be true or not, the
only thing that is certain about them is that there they are, and
not how they came there.