AS APPLICABLE IN PRACTICAL FORESTRY. 209 



successfully that has once been neglected in thinning. Cutting 

 down and allowing a new crop to grow from the stools is some- 

 times recommended ; but this plan is attended with at least one 

 very serious objection — namely, the circumstance that the scion 

 springing from an old stool produces a tree in character, form, 

 and habit exactly like the parent from which it springs. A 

 •dwarfed and stunted tree produces one dwarfed and stunted, and 

 so on. Since, then, so very little can practically be done to 

 recover neglected plantations, the greater is the necessity for 

 preventing them from going wrong. 



To all rules there are exceptions, and to this the larch appears 

 to be so ; for, of all others, the larch gains most by thinning and 

 suffers least from it. It is very impatient of confinement, and 

 enjoys freedom and liberty, although they come even late. On 

 bare pole-like trees I have seen lateral branches formed and 

 develo]3ed beyond anything I have witnessed in any other forest 

 tree. Unless the trees are sound and healthy, however, no 

 lateral growth will take place by thinning. There is something, 

 also, very remarkable about its roots ; I know some old stools 

 still vital from which the trees were cut more than twenty 

 years ago. How they continue vital and yet produce no shoots 

 is a profound mystery, and all the more so that no other stools 

 remain in the same state. 



The system of thinning young plantations for profit is very 

 objectionable. Not that there is any wrong in disposing of the 

 thinnings to the best advantage ; but the prolits spoken of as 

 derived from thinnings have done much to mislead proprietors, 

 and induce them to injure, if not ruin, their woodlands. I saw 

 a plantation lately which had been thinned for pit-props, and it 

 was sad to see most of the fine grown and best proportioned trees 

 cut down, and the coarse and weakly ones left as the crop, many 

 of the latter so weakly that they could not sustain their own 

 Aveight. A report set forth this plantation as an example of 

 profit, and showed that it yielded, as thinnings in a given time, 

 from L.8 to L.IO per acre. The same report should have stated 

 how much such thinnings had reduced the value of the plantation. 



On some estates a large revenue is derived from what are 

 termed thinnings, although the plantations are so thin already 

 that they are suffering from it. I know young Scots pine planta- 

 tions being thinned containing only 300 trees per acre, and some 

 also containing only half that number. Thinning is a very 

 general term, and is understood and practised very differently. 

 Cutting down the tender sapling as a weed of a few years' 

 growth is termed thinning, and the operation of felling all but 

 the last tree of the matured old forest is known by the same 

 term. The two greatest errors amongst foresters are — beinGj too 

 late in commencing to thin, and continuing the operation too 







