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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 







A Natural Forest of White Pine in Minnesota. 



mill, we could every year cut the more mature trees, leave the younger 

 ones to grow, and in reasonable time bring it into a normal forest. 

 Usually, however, natural forests are remote from established lines of 

 transportation, and the lumberman who handles them must construct 

 temporary logging railroads which are taken up when the timber has 

 all been cut. He has invested his money, expecting to get it back soon 

 with a profit and can not wait for trees to grow. He usually cuts clean 

 as he goes. He can not afford to practise forestry and no reasonable 

 person expects him to do so. It would take too long for nature unaided 

 to renew forest. Natural reforestation has as good a chance in Germany 

 as anywhere because fire there does little damage. But Germany plants 

 over a hundred thousand acres of forest annually. 



If we were to start an artificial pine forest it would be by planting 

 seedlings — nursery grown trees — two years old, four feet apart, re- 

 quiring at that rate 2,722 seedlings per acre. If land we purpose using 

 happens to be part of an abandoned farm or is land from which nat- 

 ural forest was cut twenty or thirty years ago, probably five per cent, 

 of the area is already well stocked by nature with valuable kinds of 

 timber trees. Probably another five per cent, of the area consists of 

 rocks or wet places that can not be planted, so that only ninety per cent, 

 of our area will require to be planted. 



Why should trees be planted as close as four feet? To get the 

 ground shaded as soon as possible, to promote moisture and fertility; 

 also to promote height growth. In a crowded forest the shade causes 

 the trees to shed their lower limbs. It is only in this way that long 

 smooth logs, free from knots, are produced. Every one has seen that 

 a tree in the open grows too many branches to make good timber. In a 



