METHODS AND PROFIT OF TREE-PLANTING. 17 



fifty cents apiece, and hardly worth that, have been planted with the 

 native pitch and white pine, the Scotch and Austrian pine, the Nor- 

 way spruce, and the European larch, are equally convincing. Mr. 

 Fay planted in 1854, and in 1877 had one hundred and twenty-five 

 acres densely covered with trees. The larches had reached a height 

 of forty feet and a diameter of fourteen inches. Scotch pines, sown 

 as late as 1861, were thirty feet high and ten inches in diameter a foot 

 from the ground. Mr. Fay is abundantly satisfied with the results of 

 his experiments. Professor Sargent says, speaking of the plantations 

 made by Messrs. Fay and others : " When we consider the success 

 which has attended the experiments of these gentlemen in reclothing 

 their property with forest growths, under circumstances, too, as dis- 

 advantageous as it is possible for Massachusetts to offer, it must be 

 acknowledged that the attempt to replant our unimproved lands. is a 

 perfectly feasible one; and the only wonder is that the inhabitants of 

 Essex and Barnstable Counties, with such examples before them, have 

 not already planted their worthless, worn-out lands with a crop which 

 would yield a larger profit than any they have produced since the first 

 clearing of the forest." 



Taking the results of Mr. Fay's planting, and the average results 

 of the planting of the larches in the Highlands of Scotland, which are 

 nearly the same in like conditions, Professor Sargent finds that, on 

 ordinary soil, larches planted when about one foot high and three years 

 old, will in twenty years average twenty-two feet in height and seven 

 inches in diameter three feet from the ground ; and that in thirty 

 years they will be from thirty-five to forty feet high and twelve inches 

 in diameter; and, if thinned out, the remaining trees, at fifty years 

 from the time of planting, will reach from sixty to seventy feet in 

 height and at least twenty inches in diameter. On this basis he makes 

 the estimated profit on a plantation of ten acres of larch-trees, at the 

 end of fifty years, to be $52,282.75, or thirteen per cent per annum for 

 the whole time. The estimate is carefully made, as would be seen, if we 

 had space for the particulars ; but with a considerable discount from 

 the figures of Professor Sargent there is left, certainly, a reasonable 

 profit. 



It is to be remembered also that trees are not exhausting crops, but 

 that they tend to enrich and improve the land on which they grow. 

 If this be taken into account, the estimate of possible and probable 

 profit from the planting of our many acres of wild, rocky, sandy, and 

 other poor and practically waste land, is to be counted only by mill- 

 ions of dollars, while the benefits that would accrue from extensive 

 tree-planting in the more equable distribution of rain and the flow of 

 our streams^ in meteorologic influences upon health and comfort, and in 

 other ways, would be simply incalculable. 



VOL. XXI. 2 



