[Illustration: CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL OF POPULAR LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART Fifth Series ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832 CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS) NO. 46.—VOL. I. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1884. PRICE 1½_d._] SCOTTISH DEER-FORESTS. Deer-stalking has for many a long year been looked upon as the king of sports; and in Scotland, a large area of land has from an early period been occupied by the red-deer and the roebuck. At the present time, as far as has been ascertained by a recent inquiry under Royal Commission, the extent of all the deer-forests in Scotland amounts to about two millions of acres. It is only, however, right to say that the land devoted to these animals could not be more profitably employed. It has been affirmed by practical men that it is scarcely possible to feed even one hardy black-faced sheep on less than six acres of such land, so scant is the herbage. Indeed, some intelligent farmers maintain that it will take a hundred and sixty acres of forest-land to graze a score of these sheep. No person who is even tolerably familiar with the deer-districts of Scotland will gainsay this. The contour, altitude, and climate of a deer-forest quite unfit it for agricultural purposes—the range of ground occupied by these stately animals is of the most miscellaneous description: hill and dale, moor and morass, mountain and glen, with every here and there rocky precipices, and small groups of trees naturally planted, and chiefly of the hardy native birch. In the three chief deer-counties of Scotland, the cultivable area is singularly small in proportion to their total extent. Taking Argyll, Inverness, and Ross-shire as examples, only three hundred and eighty-seven thousand five hundred and ninety-eight acres are to be found under cultivation, out of an area which covers six million eight hundred and twenty-three thousand and two acres, leaving nearly six and a half millions of acres to be inhabited by sheep, deer, and grouse, and as the site of lochs, rivers, and mountains, and sterile places on which nothing grows and nothing can live.