4. When man grew corn and other plants, the forest vanished altogether. Dr. Johnson said he scarcely saw a tree between Carlisle and Edinburgh. Yet first the King, then the Barons, had their parks and woodlands for preserving game. Moreover, the yews in the churchyards of England, and the ash trees by the Scotch farmtoons and peel-towers, were carefully looked after.

5. When great towns arose, and men became factory hands and steel workers, rich men began to make plantations in the lowlands, and to use the depopulated highlands for grouse moors and deer forests.

6. When men become wiser than they are now, it will be seen that great forests are necessary on all waste-land and barren places, both to keep a healthy country population and because it will pay.

CHAPTER V
FLOWERS

Man's ideas of the use of flowers—Sprengel's great discovery—Insects, not man, consulted—Pollen carried to set seed—Flowers and insects of the Whinstone Age—Coal Age flowers—Monkey-puzzle times—Chalk flowers—Wind-blown pollen—Extravagant expenditure of pollen in them—Flower of the pine—Exploding flowers—Brilliant alpines—Intense life in flowers—Colour contrasts—Lost bees—Evening flowers—Humming birds and sunbirds—Kangaroo—Floral clocks—Ages of flowers—How to get flowers all the year round—Ingenious contrivances—Yucca and fig—Horrible-smelling flowers—Artistic tastes of birds, insects, and man.

FOR many centuries flowers were considered as pleasing and attractive decorations stuck about the world in the same way as they are put in a drawing-room in order to give people pleasure. Very soon they were found to be extremely useful in poetry, sometimes to point a moral or disguise a sermon, like the primrose in Peter Bell, but more generally to produce a good impression on the BELOVED OBJECT. Burns puts the usual view of flowers very nicely in the following: "But I will down yon river rove amang the woods sae green, and a' to pu' a posie to my ain dear May." Possibly this is the meaning also in the exquisite lines of Shakespeare about the pansy:—

"Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a little western flower,—

Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,—