where the wetter richer habitats they require are more readily available (Sobey 1993, 1995). Since only one of the French settlements was west of the Bedeque-Malpeque isthmus, the west of the island is likely to have been an area less visited by most of the recorders, almost all of whom were government functionaries based at Port La-Joie.

The peculiar one is trembling aspen: though largetooth aspen and balsam poplar are nowadays relatively uncommon in Prince Edward Island forests (Sobey 1993), trembling aspen is one of the most common and widely distributed of the island’s trees. Its single appearance in the records thus requires an explanation. The reason may be that it is an early successional species, colonising after fire and disturbance, and such habitats would have only become available in any quantity in the later years of the French period.

THE ABSENTEES

There are four of Prince Edward Island’s current tree genera (comprising seven species) that are completely absent from the records of the French period: the alders (A/nus incana, speckled alder, and A. viridis, downy alder), the cherries (Prunus pensy/vanicum, fire cherry and P. virginiana, choke cherry), the mountain-ashes (Sorbus americana and S. decora) and ironwood (Ostrya virginiana). All but ironwood have widely distributed equivalents in France.83 The reason for their absence may be that they are usually small and unimportant trees or shrubs and/or are not very common. For ironwood, which is capable of forming large trees, the factor responsible was undoubtedly its rarity rather than its size: it is today among the rarest trees on the island being found in only a few localities in the extreme west of the province, and it probably was as uncommon in the eighteenth century. But the speckled alder of the swamps must surely have been as common in such habitats in the eighteenth century as it is today — it was probably omitted from the records because it was considered an unimportant shrub. We can surmise that the two cherries, the mountain ashes and downy alder must have been seen by at least some of the early recorders. But none of them are large or important trees, and also, being either successional species (fire cherry) and/or wood-edge and shade-intolerant species

‘3 The ironwood equivalent (Ostrya carpinifolia) occurs only in the

extreme south-east corner of France near the Mediterranean (Jalas 8. Suominen 1976).

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(downy alder, choke cherry, the mountain ashes) they were all likely to have been less common than they are today. Thus we can readily account for the absence of all these species from the records.

GENERAL COMPARISON OF THE FREQUENCY OF THE TREES.

Let us imagine that all that we have to tell us about the composition of the forests of Prince Edward Island before European settlement are these written records surviving from the French period. Setting aside for the moment what we know of the present forest and about the specific ecological requirements of particular trees, let us try to construct from these tree records alone a picture of the forests as they were in the early eighteenth century. (This is an approach familiar to landscape and environmental historians of more ancient periods who often have only written records as evidence of past landscapes.) For the records of the French period, a simple approach, but which has also a quantitative aspect (even though the amount of data is small and is not amenable to statistical analysis), is to compare the number of times the various tree species are mentioned in the surviving records: Table 1-4A does this by ranking the trees in terms of the frequency with which they are recorded in the tree lists of Table 1-2, and Table 1-4B gives a ranking of the trees based on their frequency in the tally of all records contained in Table 1-3.

If we look first at the ranking of the trees in the tree lists (Table 1-4A), we observe that of the broad-leaved species, beech leads the table, appearing in seven of the eight lists, followed by yellow birch and oak (each in six lists), then sugar maple (or the maples generically) (in four), followed by birch (definitely white birch for two of the three records) and ash, and then five species that occur in only one or two lists. It is notable that the first four trees are climax hardwood forest species, and of these, beech leads, with yellow birch and oak equally second and the maples third. However, the high ranking of oak in the table is likely to have been due to the bias on the part of the recorders that has already been noted, and oak was likely to have been far less common than its frequency in the tree lists might suggest.

Of the conifers, only pine manages to equal the frequency of the top broad-leaves: it leads the conifers, occurring in six of the tree lists. However, if we combine the listings for prusse and