The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 10, August, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 10, August, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours. There you are never
reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all,
some villager's familiar wood-lot, some widow's thirds, from which her
ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in
some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan
too, and old bound-marks may be found every forty rods, if you will
search. 'Tis true, the map may inform you that you stand on land
granted by the State to some academy, or on Bingham's purchase; but
these names do not impose on you, for you see nothing to remind you of
the academy or of Bingham. What were the "forests" of England to
these? One writer relates of the Isle of Wight, that in Charles the
Second's time "there were woods in the island so complete and
extensive, that it is said a squirrel might have travelled in several
parts many leagues together on the top of the trees." If it were not
for the rivers, (and he might go round their heads,) a squirrel could
here travel thus the whole breadth of the country.
We have as yet had no adequate account of a primitive pine-forest. I
have noticed that in a physical atlas lately published in
Massachusetts, and used in our schools, the "wood land" of North
America is limited almost solely to the valleys of the Ohio and some
of the Great Lakes, and the great pine-forests of the globe are not
represented. In our vicinity, for instance, New Brunswick and Maine
are exhibited as bare as Greenland. It may be that the children of
Greenville, at the foot of Moosehead Lake, who surely are not likely
to be scared by an owl, are referred to the valley of the Ohio to get
an idea of a forest; but they would not know what to do with their
moose, bear, caribou, beaver, etc., there. Shall we leave it to an
Englishman to inform us, that "in North America, both in the United
States and Canada, are the most extensive pine-forests in the world"?
The greater part of New Brunswick, the northern half of Maine, and
adjacent parts of Canada, not to mention the northeastern part of New
York and other tracts further off, are still covered with an almost
unbroken pine-forest.
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