Birds and All Nature, Vol. 6, No. 3, October 1899 / Illustrated by Color Photography

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ILLUSTRATED BY COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY.
Vol. VI.
No. 3
OCTOBER, 1899.

FORESTS.
John M. Coulter, Ph.D. Head Professor of Botany, University of Chicago.
FORESTS have always been admired, and in ancient times they were often considered sacred, the special dwelling-places of gods and various strange beings. We can easily understand how forests thus affected men. There is a solemnity about them, a quiet grandeur, which is very impressive, and the rustling of their branches and leaves has that mysterious sound which caused the ancients to people them with spirits. We still recognize the feeling of awe that comes in the presence of forests, although we have long since ceased to explain it by peopling them with spirits.
Once forests covered all parts of the earth where plants could grow well, and no country had greater forests than North America. When America was discovered, there was a huge, unbroken forest from the Atlantic west to the prairies. Now much of this has been cut away, and we see only small patches of it. Men must use the forest, and still they must save it, and they are now trying to find out how they may do both.
Forests are sometimes almost entirely made up of one kind of tree, and then they are called pure forests. Pine and beech forests are examples of this kind. More common with us, however, are the mixed forests, made up of many kinds of trees, and nowhere in the world are there such mixed forests as in our Middle States, where beech, oak, hickory, maple, elm, poplar, gum, walnut, sycamore, and many others all grow together.
Probably the densest forests in the world are those in the Amazon region of South America. So dense are they that hardly a ray of light ever sifts through the dense foliage, and even at noon there is only a dim twilight beneath the trees. The tallest forests are the Eucalyptus forests of Australia, where the trees rise with slender trunks to the height of four or five hundred feet. But the largest trees in the world, when we consider both height and diameter, are the giant redwoods (Sequoias) of the Pacific coast. All concede, however, that the most extensive, the most varied, and the most beautiful forests of the world are those of the Atlantic and Middle States.