THERE is perhaps no feature of Irish scenery more characteristic and depressing than the almost universal absence of those tracts of woods which in other countries soften the outlines of hills and valleys. The traveler gazing on its bald mountains and treeless glens can hardly believe that Ireland was at one time covered from shore to shore with magnificent forests. One of the ancient names of the country was "The Isle of Woods" and so numerous are its place-names derived from the growth of woods, shrubs, groves, oaks, etc., that (as Dr. Joyce says) "if a wood were now to spring up in every place bearing a name of this kind the country would become clothed with an almost uninterrupted succession of forests." On the tops of the barest hills and buried in the deepest bogs are to be found the roots, stems and other remains of these ancient woods, mostly of oak and pine, some of the bogs being literally full of stems, the splinters of which burn like matches.

The destruction of these woods is of comparatively recent date. Cambrensis, who accompanied Henry II. into Ireland in the twelfth century, notices the enormous quantities of woods everywhere existing. But their extirpation soon began with the gradual rise of English supremacy in the land, the object in view being mainly to increase the amount or arable land, to deprive the natives of shelter, to provide fuel, and to open out the country for military purposes. So anxious were the new landlords to destroy the forests that many old leases contain clauses coercing tenants to use no other fuel. Many old trees were cut down and sold for twelve cents. On a single estate in Kerry, after the revolution of 1688, trees were cut down of the value of $100,000. A paper laid before the Irish houses of parliament describes the immense quantity of timber that in the last years of the seventeenth century was shipped from ports in Ulster, and how the great woods in that province (290,000 trees in all) were almost destroyed.

The houses passed an act for the planting of 250,000 trees, but it was of no avail, and so denuded of timber had the country become that large works started in Elizabeth's reign for the smelting of iron were obliged to be stopped at last for want of charcoal. The present century has continued the deplorable story of destruction. In forty years, from 1841 to 1881, 45,000 acres of timber were cut down and sold. Every landlord cut down, scarcely anyone planted, so that at the present day there is hardly an eightieth part of Ireland's surface under timber.