AFFORESTATION.
(To rite Norroo or TER " SPECTATOR.") Sin,—Leaving economy wholly aside, surely no reasonably civilised person would suggest that anything but ruination from an aesthetic point of view could result from covering our English and Welsh highlands with trees, above all with the deadly monotony of pine-woods! Is it conceivable that any true lover of our British hills could regard such a prospect without dismay ? I will not waste your space with a super- fluous relation of the countless beauties of detail that would be buried under the exotic canopy. -Where would be the crisp turf, the bracken, the gorse, the heather, the grey boulder, the dark cliff, the white trail of the torrent, the thousand shades and colours needless to recall to any lover of the hills ? Again, who that has travelled does not know, not merely the comparative monotony of general appearance, but the limita- tions to movement and outlook, belonging to mountains of from two thousand to four thousand feet covered with forest P Hill- walking as we in England, as almost nowhere else, understand it would be a thing of the past. Mr. Robinson in your issue of February 20th speaks complacently of covering Salisbury Plain with timber, and almost suggests that such an unthink- able vandalism would be an aesthetic improvement. Such an attitude, of course, is quite impregnable.—I am, Sir, Sm., A. G. B. P.S.—Wordsworth in his little-known " short " guide to the Lakes deplored even the plantations of firs and larch that were then being instituted.
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