forms the timber line, it would be remarkable if the beech had not in early days gained a footing in Scotland and Ireland. The mere negative evidence is of little value, as scarcely any scientific work has yet been done in the way of exploration of the peat-mosses and other recent deposits; and the woods, from which are made the handles of numerous prehistoric implements preserved in our museums, have rarely been examined.[1]
The beech occurs in a wild state throughout the greater part of Northern, Central, and Western Europe, usually growing gregariously in forests which, when undisturbed by man, have a tendency to spread and take the place of oak, which, owing to its inability to support such dense shade, is often suppressed by the beech.
In Norway, according to Schubeler,[2] it is called bok, and is wild only near Laurvik, where he believes it to be truly indigenous, and is a small tree, the largest he measured being 7 feet 4 inches in girth. At Hosanger, however, a planted beech had in 1864 attained 75 feet at 81 years old, with a diameter of 27 inches. It ripens seed as far north as Trondhjem in good years, and exists in Nordland as far north as lat. 67°. 56.
In Sweden its most northerly wild habitat is Elfkalven, lat. 60°.35, though it has been planted as far north as lat. 64°.
In Russia the beech extends only a little way,—its eastern limit in Europe passing the Prussian coast of the Baltic between Elbing and Königsberg, about 54° 30' N. lat., and running south from Königsberg, where the last spontaneous beeches occur on the Brandenburg estate, continuing through Lithuania, eastern Poland, Volhynia, where beech woods still occur between lat. 52° and 50°, and Podolia to Bessarabia. It is absent from the governments of Kief and Kherson, but reappears in the Crimea, where, however, it is only met with in the mountains of the south-east coast. In the Caucasus, Persia, and Asia Minor it is replaced by the closely allied species, Fagus orientalis.
In Finland and at St. Petersburg it exists as a bush only, but is not wild. On the southern shores of the Baltic it forms large forests, and in Denmark is one of the most abundant and valuable timber trees, growing to as large a size and forming as clean trunks as it does farther south. Lyell speaks of it as follows:[3]—"In the time of the Romans the Danish isles were covered as now with magnificent beech forests. Nowhere in the world does this tree flourish more luxuriantly than in Denmark, and eighteen centuries seem to have done little or nothing towards modifying the character of the forest vegetation. Yet in the antecedent bronze period there were no beech trees, or at most but a few stragglers, the country being then covered with oak."
At page 415 he says further—"In Denmark great changes were taking place in the vegetation. The pine, or Scotch fir, buried in the oldest peat, gave place at length to the oak; and the oak, after flourishing for ages, yielded in its turn to the
- ↑ In a paper by H.B. Watt on the "Scottish Forests in Early Historic Times," printed in Annals of the Andersonian Nat. Soc. ii. 91, Glasg., 1900, which contains many interesting particulars of the oak and other trees, no mention is made of the Beech. In the Highland Society's Gaelic Dictionary (1828), faidhbhile is given as the word for beech; here faidh is cognate with fagus, bhile being one of the Gaelic terms for tree. This name is also known in Ulster.
- ↑ Schubeler, Viridarium Norvegicum, vol. i. 521.
- ↑ Lyell, Antiquity of Man, 2nd. ed. 1873, pp. 17, 415.
