FIXING SANDY SOIL. 281 



ing on the slope of an old gravel-pit, average three feet six 

 inches in girth four feet from the ground ; while a tree late- 

 ly cut in Brookline, Mass., with twenty-seven annual laj'ers 

 of growth, is only fifteen inches in diameter four feet from 

 the ground. This tree grew in good garden-soil, and had 

 eleven and a half inches of heart-wood and three-fourths of 

 an inch of pith in its centre. Two trees planted at Chickis, 

 Lancaster County, Penn., in 1837, were, in 1868, eighteen 

 inches in diameter : in 1877 these trees were cut down, having 

 died, apparently from old age, and measured, at two feet 

 from the ground, one five feet four inches, the other five 

 feet eight inches. The soil in which they grew was poor and 

 gravelly, resting on a deposit of quartzite of Potsdam sand. 

 In that locality the ailanthus has become entirely natural- 

 ized,' and now grows there spontaneously as freely as any of 

 the native trees. These few observations point to the fact 

 that the ailantlius grows with nearly equal rapidity in poor 

 and in rich soil, and that it is particularly adapted for plant- 

 ing in exposed situations along our seaboard. Experiments 

 made with this tree in Europe lead to a similar conclusion. 

 Mr. George P. Marsh, in describing the eiforts of the Russian 

 Government to cover with forest-growth the steppes extend- 

 ing along the coast of the Black Sea, near Odessa, where the 

 soil is of a particularly loose and sandy character, says, — 



" The tree best suited to this locality, and, as there is good reason to 

 suppose, to sandy plains in general, is the Ailanthus grandulosa, or Japan 

 varnish-tree. The remarkable success which has crowned the experi- 

 ments at Odessa will, no doubt, stimulate similar trials elsewhere ; and it 

 seems not impossible that the arundo and maritime pine, which have 

 fixed so many thousand acres of drifting sands in AVestern Europe, will 

 be partially, at least, superseded by the tamarisk and the varnish tree."^ 



He quotes also on the same subject from Rentsch, Der 

 Wald, pp. 44, 45, the following : — 



" ' Sixteen years ago,' says an Odessa landholder, ' I attempted to fix 

 the sand of the moving steppes, which covers the rocky ground to the 

 depth of a foot, and forms moving hillocks with every change of wind. 

 I tried acacias and pines in vain ; nothing would grow on such a soil. 



1 As I am informed by Dr. S. S. Holdman of Chickis, Penn., by whom 

 the two trees were planted in 1837, and who has kindly furnished me with the 

 account of their growth. 



2 The Earth as modified by Human Action, p. 391. 



36 



