METHODS AND PROFIT OF TREE-PLANTING. 5 



one year, whereas in the other, by biting and mangling one year's 

 shoot, mischief is done to at least three years' growth." But he has 

 quite understated the possible if not probable damage. At the Vienna 

 Exposition in 1873 there was a convention of forest managers from 

 most of the European countries, and an extensive exhibition of forest 

 products. Among these there were sections of trees taken from a for- 

 est property near Krainburg, and designed to illustrate the compara- 

 tive growth of trees when properly protected and cultivated and when 

 exposed to browsing animals. There were shown trees which in thirty 

 years had attained a height of only thirty inches, and others of the 

 same age which had grown near them, but protected from animals, 

 that were twenty-eight feet in height. The cubic contents of sixteen 

 hundred trees, exposed and protected, were measured, with this result : 

 in the unpastured woods, three thousand and fifty-six cubic feet ; in 

 the pastured woods, eleven. The annual increase of growth was found 

 to be as one hundred to one, or a loss of ninety-nine per cent, of pos- 

 sible results. Here certainly is food for study. 



In many of the ancient forests of Europe there has come down, by 

 immemorial usage, the feudal right of the neighboring peasants to 

 pasturage ; but so injurious is the exercise of this right felt to be 

 that the owners of the forests make it one of their chief endeavors to 

 extinguish this right, by purchase or otherwise, whenever they can. 



Again, looking upon his trees as a crop, the planter will engage in 

 his work with a patient forecasting of the future. His success or fail- 

 ure does not depend upon what he may do, or fail to do, in a single 

 season or a single year. His trees will come to maturity only with the 

 lapse of generations. He may be planting in part for his grandchildren 

 rather than for himself, except so far as they are himself. The pine, 

 for example, is reckoned to come to maturity only after a growth of 

 one hundred and sixty years. All the more need, therefore, for the 

 adoption of a proper method, and that he should 



" Learn to labor and to wait." 



The European managers of forests, in forming their plantations, 

 allow from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and sixty years as 

 the period of growth, or of rotation, as they call it. In laying out a 

 forest plantation they will divide the proposed tract into six or eight 

 sections, planting one every twenty years, and, when the whole is 

 planted, cutting and renewing a section every twenty years. Mean- 

 time there is a thinning process going on all the while, as the trees 

 grow and require more room for their proper development. By this 

 division of a forest into sections, they avoid the evil effects upon water- 

 supply, climate, etc., resulting from the sweeping off of large forests 

 at one time. 



European foresters also insist strongly upon the importance of 

 drainage for the best growth of the forest. They urge that this is 



