GRAYLING INSTITUTE. 399 



Mr. Webber : I never saw it growing except on a light soil. You will see 

 gome of it along the south end of Lake Michigan as you approach Chicago on 

 the Michigan Central Railroad, growing on the light sandy soil near Michi- 

 gan City. 



Mr. Shriver: Jack pine grows on most any kind of land. I have some 

 clay soil that is just as heavy as any laud, and jack pine grows on it as thick 

 as on any other land, and I have sand upon which it grows just the same. 



Mr. Love: I cleared off fifteen acres of what you call jack pine lands, and 

 some of it was pretty heavy, the soil being a solid heavy clay. la the neigh- 

 borhood where I live there is not much jack pine growing on our lightest 

 lands, in fact there is not much of anything that grows on them, but as you 

 get on to higher ground you generally find the higher the land the better the 

 soil. On my land the jack pine grows in clumps of no great extent. On the 

 highest land, where there is a good solid gravelly clay loam, the growth is 

 mostly oak grubs, filled in with witch hazel, thorn, poplar, June berry and 

 any amount of willow. 



Mr. Webber : What kind of oak are those grubs ? 



Mr. Love : Ked oak and white oak. The stones are so thick on some of 

 the land that it makes a man's elbows ache to look over it after the land has 

 been cultivated. The stones range from as big as your fist up to' boulders 

 that will weigh tons. This jack pine was a native of my old Pennsylvania home, 

 and there they call it pitch pine. There the soil was very light, lighter in fact 

 than it is here, and yet by careful cultivation, seeding to clover and turning 

 it in, it has made the best farming land in northwestern Pennsylvania. 



Mr. Palmer: From the answers already given you will see that we have 

 jack pine lands in this county of every gradation, from the lightest sand to 

 heavy clay. On Mr. Thurber's place is a clay that will compare very favor- 

 ably with Williams county, Ohio, lands, and on the same place there is soil 

 of the lightest grade, and jack pine grows equally well on all of it. 



Mr. Randall: I have been on these plains for the last five years. I am not 

 well versed in botany, but am inclined to think that this is no pine at all, 

 but a spruce, as the annuals are less than an inch long. The United States 

 survey calls it spruce pine. It grows on clay as well as on sand, but always 

 where there is little or no vegetable matter in the soil — always on poor land. 

 Fires sweep over the plains and seem to burn everything of a combustible 

 nature, and the spruce pine will come up and be burned down and come up 

 again just as thick as wheat. Some think it grows on dry lands only, but it 

 grows in what we call jack pine swamps, where there is water all under and 

 around it the same as in soil that is very dry, with scarcely anything 

 on top of the sand excepting the annuals that have been dropped from the 

 pine. 



Mr. Love : In regard to this jack pine growing on wet land. The north 

 half of section thirty, the south half of the southwest quarter of section 

 twenty and the northwest quarter of section twenty-nine, when I first saw it 

 eleven years ago last August, was a bed of muck. At that time of the year 

 it was dry for a few inches deep, but to-day, and for the past three years, 

 that bed of muck has been covered all over with water. It was covered here 

 and there with old jack pine stumps, six to ten inches in diameter. Around 

 the border of it and encroaching upon the muck there were green jack pine, 

 some six to ten inches through. Three or four years ago we found the water 

 didn't disappear through the summer, but kept rising, and we built a road 



