There is good reason to believe that the surface of the habitable earth, in all the climates and regions which have been the abodes of dense and civilized populations, was, with few exceptions, already covered with a forest growth when it first became the home of man. This we infer from the extensive vegetable remains--trunks, branches, roots, fruits, seeds, and leaves of trees--so often found in conjunction with works of primitive art, in the boggy soil of districts where no forests appear to have existed within the eras through which written annals reach; from ancient historical records, which prove that large provinces, where the earth has long been wholly bare of trees, were clothed with vast and almost unbroken woods when first made known to Greek and Roman civilization; [Footnote: The recorded evidence in support of the proposition in the text has been collected by L. F. Alfred Maury, in his Histoire des grandes Forets de la Gauls et de l'ancienne France, and by Becquerel, in his important work, Des climats et de l'Influence qu'exercent les Sols boises et non boises, livre ii., chap. i. to iv. We may rank among historical evidences on this point, if not technically among historical records, old geographical names and terminations etymologically indicating forest or grove, which are so common in many parts of the Eastern Continent now entirely stripped of woods--such as, in Southern Europe, Breuil, Broglio, Brolio, Brolo; in Northern, Bruhl, and the endings -dean, -den, -don, -ham, -holt, -horst, -hurst, -lund, -shaw, -shot, -skog, -skov, -wald, -weald, -wold, -wood.] and from the state of much of North and of South America, as well as of many islands, when they were discovered and colonized by the European race. [Footnote: The island of Madeira, whose noble forests wore devastated by fire not Iong after its colonization by European settlors, takes its name from the Portuguese word tor wood.]