TRANSPLANTING FOREST-TREES. 191 



before they become of any value, ninety per cent, of them 

 will disappear, and seventy-five per cent, of the remainder 

 will but struggle on for a time, in the fruitless attempt to 

 maintain an existence against the encroachments of their more 

 vigorous competitors. 



What advantage can it be to draw upon the soil for the 

 support of trees which are not expected to become mature ? 

 A good former, intending to raise one hundred turnips or cab- 

 bages on a given area, would not start five hundred plants, 

 and wait for four hundred of them to die of suffocation or 

 starvation. Every plant, in excess of the required number, 

 would be a mere cultivated weed, all the more noxious be- 

 cause it would take from the soil precisely the same elements 

 which are necessary to the growth and perfection of the pro- 

 posed crop. Why is not this proposition as true of trees as 

 of turnips or cabbages? One tree to each square rod, or 

 one hundred and sixty per acre, is quite as large a numl^er as 

 can be expected to grow, rapidl}^ and evenly, to a size suita- 

 ble for good sawing timber. Twice that number, or three 

 hundred and twenty per acre, would be sufiicient to prevent 

 the necessity for re-setting any single trees, lost through acci- 

 dent or otherwise. 



The only plausible reason that can be urged in favor of 

 cumbering the ground with supernumerary trees is, that the 

 growth of limbs will be thereby prevented, and the trunks 

 kept smooth and clean. But vigorous limbs are absolutely 

 essential to the rapid and healthy growth of trees, a scarcity 

 of limbs necessarily resulting in deficiency of foliage. When 

 they have performed their appropriate functions, nature will 

 remove them just as surely as she will underling and useless 

 trees ; with this advantage in favor of the limbs, that while 

 they remain, they will promote the growth of the timber 

 instead of hindering it. With only three hundred trees per 

 acre the lower branches would all disappear long before the 

 trunks would attain a diameter of two feet. 



Pine lumber, in some of its almost innumerable forms, has 

 become almost indispensable to the success of nearly every 

 industrial pursuit. The primitive gro^vth of timber on our 

 northern borders from which such lumber has been chiefly 

 manufactured, and which has been deemed almost inexhausti- 



