which succeeds, when the party divides for the pleasure 
     
     of walking, and there are undoubtedly, ”worse 
     
     occupations in the world” than wandering with a pretty 
     
     woman in the skirts of the wood, or along the margin of 
     
     the sea, enjoying the ”sweet converse”, and the delights 
     
    
   
   
    
     of the open air and the surrounding scenery. 864 
     
    
   
   
    
     Such ’romantic excursions’ into the forest are 
     
     likely to have been confined to whatever leisured 
     
     class the island possessed MacGregor’s 
     
     picnikers have servants to carry their picnic 
     
     baskets! Most islanders would not have had 
     
     servants; they would also not have had the time 
     
     for such frivolity nor, given their innate 
     
     antagonism towards the forest, even, I think, the 
     
     inclination. And some religious persons, due to an 
     
     atavistic suspicion of the wilderness as the place 
     
     of sin, would not have approved of such ”picnic 
     
     excursions” in the ”skirts of the woods”. It was 
     
     perhaps such a view of the forest as a site of 
     
     potential temptation and of frowned-upon 
     
     interpersonal encounters, however innocent, that 
     
     underlay the Calvinist attitude that was instilled 
     
     early into the young Andrew Macphail that to 
     
     ”stroll on a forest path with motive ulterior to the 
     
     purpose of passing through, was ’to lurk in the 
     
    
   
   
    
     III 
     
    
   
   
    
     woods . 
     
    
   
   
    
     THE 'SCIENTIFIC FOREST' 
     
    
   
   
    
     In addition to visits to the ’Romantic forest’, there 
     
     was another more objective reason for some 
     
     people to visit the forest. Advances in the natural 
     
     sciences during the nineteenth century led to 
     
     people beginning to view natural habitats, 
     
     including the forest, along with the plants and 
     
     animals it contained, as a topic suitable for 
     
     amateur scientific study; and some island residents 
     
     and visitors, in view of the writings they have left 
     
     us, must have begun to make visits into the forest 
     
     expressly for this purpose. Though many of the 
     
     emigrants' handbooks had included lists of the 
     
     major tree species of the islands“, any comments 
     
     they made were almost all utilitarian, with the 
     
     emphasis being placed on the uses to which the 
     
     wood of each tree could be put, and on the 
     
     various trees as indicators of the suitability of the 
     
     land for farming.866 However, among these, there 
     
     was one early writer who went well beyond the 
     
     others: John Stewart, though admittedly, still 
     
    
   
   
    
       
     
    
   
   
    
     864 
     
    
   
   
    
     MacGregor (1828) (pp. 259-60, not extracted). 
     
    
   
   
    
     “’5 See Appendix 1,Tables 1—2 to 1-8. 
     
    
   
   
    
     566 See Table 3, page 25. 
     
    
   
   
    
     132 
     
    
   
   
    
     leaning heavily to the utilitarian in his descriptions 
     
     of the forests and its trees, included an extensive 
     
     chapter on the natural history of the native plants 
     
     of the island (with an emphasis on the trees of the 
     
     forest), and another on that of the animals (which 
     
     of course were almost all forest animals), at the 
     
     same time applying Latin binomials to both, the 
     
     first attempt at such for the island’s flora and 
     
     fauna. 
     
    
   
   
    
     However in the early nineteenth century Stewart 
     
     was the exception, and apart from the proprietor 
     
     David Stewart in 1831, who took a botanical 
     
     "stroll through the woods”, in order to look at the 
     
     ground plants and trees at Bedequew, it would 
     
     take another fifty years before, as Birch Bagster 
     
     put it in 1861, a time would arrive in the 
     
     development of the island ”when the cares of 
     
     fresh settlement suffer relaxation, and objects 
     
     of natural history are allowed a place in the 
     
     thoughts of the household” which Bagster 
     
     labelled "a noteworthy sign of progress in a new 
     
     province”868. And it is indeed from the 18605 
     
     that the first writings of the island’s resident 
     
     ’natural historians’ begin to appear: Bagster 
     
     himself in 1861 published the first lengthy list of 
     
     the island’s native herbaceous plants, at the same 
     
     time acknowledging that it was another author, 
     
     John Lawson, who had assisted him with the Latin 
     
     names. It was also in 1861 that the Reverend 
     
     George Sutherland wrote his Manual of the 
     
     Geography and Natural and Civil History of Prince 
     
     Edward Island (designed as a textbook for the 
     
     island’s public schools), in which he included an 
     
     extensive botanical section on the plants of the 
     
     island that included the tree species of the forests; 
     
     and it was also in the late 18603 that Francis Bain 
     
     began a personal journal in which over the next 
     
     sixteen years he recorded many biological and 
     
     ecological observations arising from his numerous 
     
     visits into the forest.869 
     
    
   
   
    
     Then, in the last decade of the century there were 
     
     botanists of more serious intent, both professional 
     
     and amateur, whose aim in part was to catalogue 
     
     botanically the flora of the island, including the 
     
     trees and ground plants of the forest — men such 
     
     as John McSwain, John Macoun, Lawrence 
     
    
   
   
    
       
     
    
   
   
    
     867 
     
    
   
   
    
     Stewart 1831. 
     
    
   
   
    
     ”58 Bagster 1861. 
     
    
   
   
    
     369 
     
    
   
   
    
     Bain 1868-1884.