262 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



foreign, were employed, and while few have failed entirely, 

 the foreign species, as was to be expected from the situation, 

 have been the most successful. The Scotch pine has made 

 the most rapid growth, and then the European larch. 



The Corsican pine (Pinus Laricio, Poir.), although not 

 planted as early as the others, promises to be a valuable and 

 fast-growing tree for planting mider such circumstances. 



Larch and Scotch pine, transplanted from the nursery in 

 1853, are now forty feet high, and from ten to twelve inches 

 in diameter at one foot from the ground. Trees of the Scotch 

 pine, raised from seed planted in 1861, where the trees have 

 grown, but in favorable situations, and which have been 

 properly thinned, have been cut this winter, and measured 

 thirty feet in height and ten inches in diameter one foot from 

 the ground, while the average of the trees in a large planta- 

 tion of Scotch pine, made in the same manner in 1862, and 

 which has received no special care, is twenty feet high and 

 six inches in diameter. Plants of the Corsican pine are now 

 eight feet high in only eight years from seed, the growth of 

 the last three years being over five feet. 



When we consider the success which has attended the 

 experiments of these gentlemen in reclothing their property 

 with forest growth, under circumstances, too, as disadvan- 

 tageous 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 worth- 

 less, worn-out lands with a crop which would yield a larger 

 profit than any they have produced since the first clearing of 

 the forest. 



Enormously as the price of all forest products has advanced 

 during the last twenty-five years, their future increase in 

 value must be more rapid as the supply becomes more and 

 more inadequate to the demand. The great timber districts 

 of the northern hemisphere have now all been called on to 

 supply the always increasing wants of the civilized world, 

 while no provision has as yet been made, except in limited 

 areas, or on an entirely insufilcient scale, to provide artificially 

 the wood on which our descendants must depend. 



