A spring — formerly in the forest.

Changes in

the water cycle due to forest clearing.

’A tract of ancient forest’.

The forest in winter.

The appearance of the trees.

The majestic pines.

1873 August 26‘"

The great Storm has shifted to the North West and is gradually subsiding. The heavy North wind has caused the highest tide that has been for many years. There are vessels driven right up to the bank.

1879 October 23rd

On the rear of Howard’s farm there is a beautiful spring which rushes out of a fishure in a massive bed of sandstone at the foot of a grassey hill. It expands into a little pond, which now rests its Chrystal bosm in a basin of rich, grassey slopes, which descend from the adjoining pasture land. When I first saw this spring many years ago it was in the deapth of the primative forest. Massive birches and maples of a centuary’s growth reared their trunks around it and spreading out their great arms in the sky above a conopy of foliage which the vivid rays of the sun seldom penetrated. Its glassey surface in the subdued light reflected the giant forms of these monarchs of the forest and glowed with the changing dies that gentle spring and blazing autumn spread over them, as it had done during the centuries "when no eye saw it".

It had three times the volume of water then. The forest cloke prevented the evaporation of moisture from the surface of these hills, and sinking down into the fishures of the earth it flowed out here in a strong gushing sparkling spring of wonderous volume and Christal purity. The great trees whose shade gathered the moisture that formed its volume dipped their feet into its rushing tide and drank the sparkling waves that they accumulated. These springs are the gague [gauge] to show us how much more moisture is evaporated from the surface of a cleared country than from that of a wooded one. It is said that there is more rain in a wooded than in a clear country. I doubt it. Where there is most evaporation there must be most precipitation some where. Springs do not show the amount of rain, but the difference between precipitation and re-evaporisation. In a clear country is more active circulation of moisture.

1880 January 3'd

l have been out all day amid the wintry scenes of field and wood-land. l have had occasion to pass back and forwards over a district two and a half miles in extent. On this were tracts of ancient forest, forming grand and solemn retreats of loneliness, thick groves of tall firs whose dense interlasing masses of foliage formed securest shelter from the keen blasts, open coppices of young beeches, red—twiged maples, and slender birches, and open fields and bleak hill tops where the keen winds drive the wild searching snowdrift all day long.

1880 December 16‘"

The delicate masses of the Asphidium that covered the woodey knoles with rich and delicate masses of fronds are all withered and buried beneath the snow. The many strange and varied plants that surprised and delighted the wanderer in the woodland, gone with their beauty and interest, and nothing but dead twigs and stumps left with the snows. Yet there is a grandeur and beauty in the great trees with their massive trunks and wide spreading arms, and the fir tribe with their living clokes of green. How beautiful the heavy-topped spruces are amid the winter snows! and the pinacled firs and the vast spreading solomn pines. The pines have been the poets trees for a northern land, but they are less beautiful than either spruces or firs with their lofty towering forms like a thousand cathedral spires wrapped round with holaday garlands of green. And the hemlock domes with their bowing limbs and velvety folds of light green drapery, the vergins of the forest, are more beautiful. But the pines are majestic in their native haunts. Their great shaggy, misshapen heads mount above every tree, and rise conspicuous masses of gloomey foliage above the rolling top of the forest. The pines are great and grand, but they are rude and

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