J. C. Ballagh, “The Land System in the South,” in _American Historical Association Report_, 1897, p. 109. When the land was first settled, it was everywhere covered by a dense forest, except for meadows here and there, along the shore or in the larger river-bottoms. Even to-day, of the thirty thousand square miles of land-surface in Maine, the forest is said to extend over twenty-one thousand, a district as large as New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut combined.[11] These forests, mainly of hard-wood, deciduous trees, with an admixture of conifers in Maine, had been practically untouched by the natives, except by burning the underbrush. In fact, Whitney claims that more trees had been destroyed by the beavers than by the Indians.[12] Although building stone is plentiful in New England, this abundance of timber along the Atlantic coast determined the form of the colonial architecture, and developed a type of wooden building little used in England. It also provided the materials for ship-building, the forests growing to the very edge of a shore indented almost everywhere by suitable harbors; and, in the early period, this industry is found scattered along the entire shore. But it tended to concentrate at fewer points, as the lumber-supply near at hand became exhausted, and the tonnage of vessels increased. “In reading the early commercial history of New England,” however, as Miss Semple well says, “one seems never to get away from the sound of the ship-builder's hammer, and the rush of the launching vessel.”[13] Footnote 11: H. A. Pressey, _Water-Powers of the State of Maine_; U. S. Geological Survey, 1902, p. 15. Footnote 12: J. D. Whitney, _The United States_ (Boston, 1889), p. 176. Footnote 13: E. C. Semple, _American History and its Geographic Conditions_ (Boston, 1903), p. 122. The climate, though varying in intensity from northern Maine and New Hampshire to southern Connecticut, and also from inland to the sea, is, on the whole, a severe one. Snow falls to a considerable depth everywhere, remaining in the mountains till late in the spring, the lower mean temperature of the year, as compared with the coast farther south, being due to the greater cold of winter rather than to a cooler summer. The seasonal changes, indeed, are very marked, and the cultural influence of “the harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility,” of a “winter which was always the effort to live,” and a summer which was “tropical license,” must formerly have been even greater than to-day.[14] A noteworthy feature of our Atlantic coast, climatically, is the crowding together of the isothermal lines, so that the frigid and tropical zones are brought within twenty degrees of latitude, as compared with forty in Europe. This bringing the products of so many climatic regions comparatively near to one another greatly stimulated intercolonial trade, which New England early claimed the largest share in carrying.[15] Footnote 14: