Capt. S. E. Cook on the Genus Pinus and Abies. 173 



The last Duke of Athol calculated that the possessor of his 

 woodlands on the Tay would in a few years be as rich or 

 richer than any individual in Britain ! What are these wood- 

 lands ? They consist of about ten thousand acres of larch, 

 planted in great part upon barren moor land, the aggregate 

 value of which was a very few hundreds per annum ! How 

 different our Administrations manage these things ! We are 

 at this moment almost dependent on foreign Governments for 

 permission to buy the timber, which, with hardly any cost, we 

 could produce in the same way that this princely fortune has 

 been founded. We are now actually buying larch timber 

 to build steam boats from the Italians ! We are annually lay- 

 ing out enormous sums for the growth of oak, of which one 

 large portion, that of Staffordshire, is avowedly of bad quality, 

 whilst no attempt is made to grow fir, of which a rapid and 

 most enormous profit may easily be made. To show the re- 

 lative value of an acre of larch in the north of Scotland with 

 one of oak in the New Forest, or that of Dene, we will take 

 the mountainous declivities of the Grampians at 2s. per acre ; 

 we take this value, which is very high, because Governments 

 always purchase dear, and because only the ground best suited 

 to the purpose should be selected. Land which would pro- 

 duce larch admirably in the Grampians is worth not more than 

 6d. per acre of annual rent. 



In Hampshire or Staffordshire no land which will grow 

 good oak is worth much less than 21. per acre, thus making, at 

 the high computation for larch, twenty times the value for the 

 same extent. But by the calculations of the Duke of Athol 

 ten acres of larch would suffice for the same purpose as seventy- 

 five acres of oak, on account of the trees growing so closely, 

 and that there is little ground lost. This makes a seventh or 

 less ; therefore the respective values of land in the Grampians 

 and in the south of England, if applied in this manner, are 

 one to one hundred and forty, and the cost of larch compared 

 to that of oak would be the one hundred and fortieth part, the 

 time required for the maturity of each being taken at seventy 

 to seventy-five years. It seems incredible that a subject fraught 

 with such momentous consequences to the nation should have 

 been wholly or entirely overlooked by those who have the dis- 



