THE SECRETAKY'S PORTFOLIO. 255 



those posts, and logs, and dead trees standing seventy years in the Mississippi 

 bottom have all grown on richer laud than the prairies of Iowa. 



I have observed that old rails and posts that have lasted the longest are 

 those of the strongest, heaviest, best timber of that variety; not that hickory 

 will last longer than cedar, but oak or ash that is heavy, solid, and strong 

 enough for wagon timber, is also best for post timber. When we go to tlie 

 hardware store to select farm tools, we pick the coarse grained wood that has 

 grown fast, and find it stronger as a general rule than the fine-grained. But 

 a better test of strengtli of any particular variety of timber is its weight when 

 thoroughly seasoned. And as a test of its lasting quality for post timber, is 

 its resistance to absorb water. Compare the oak and hickory, the basswood 

 and catalpa, the spruce and cedar. Tlie species that resist the water resist 

 decay. Sap wood and heart wood — who can tell us how this happens? how it 

 changes from sap wood to heart wood — changing the color and quality of the 

 wood? The hickory, with all its sap wood, is very strong and tough, while 

 the red elm, with its very thin sap wood, is about equally strong and tough, 

 but no sap wood has lasting quality. I have cut but one hardy catalpa tree 

 that was large enougli to quarter for posts, and on that the sap wood was very 

 thin, only two years' growth, and on some parts of the tree the sap was but 

 one year's growth. — Prairie Farmer. 



MONEY IN GROWING TREES. 



I tried, twenty-five years ago, to keep the original wood lot (on the farm) 

 renewed and keep a good stand of timber, by dressing up and planting in it, 

 and it proved a failure. But I am now growing all the timber I want on the 

 farm by planting seedlings, which I have propagated of sucli thrifty kinds as I 

 choose, and in such rows and belts for windbreaks and protection as my orchards 

 and fields require. These trees are making very satisfactory growth, and it is 

 all done very cheaply. So that I would recommend all farmers to plant groves 

 and belts of timber as their farms and locations require, and they would find 

 that after a few years they might clear off their original woods and have acres 

 of new land in the place of the old land they planted their trees on, and would 

 have a new and thrifty growth of timber instead of decaying forest timber, and 

 would have it where it would be both useful and ornamental to the premises; 

 besides the crop of old timber would probably much more than pay the cost of 

 starting the new timber growth. Five or six years ago I planted two acres of 

 four-year-old seedlings of white elm and soft maple, in rows sixteen feet apart 

 and three feet apart in the rows, and now the best of them are twenty feet high 

 and twelve inches in circumference, and for thinning out the rows I sell trees 

 for more money than wheat would have brought grown in those same years, and 

 can continue to sell until they are so large that I will take them for fire-wood. 

 I am growing a good crop of orchard grass between the rows, so that these acres 

 in forest timber are paying as well, and are likely to for years to come, as any 

 other acres on the farm. I am cutting now the second crop of wood where the 

 first or original wood was taken off about twenty five years ago, and last winter 

 a thousand rails were taken by a neighbor from one-third of an acre of similar 

 growth, besides a quantity of wood from their tops and timber not making 

 i-ails. Another neighbor used nice black walnut in building a house, sawed 

 from trees that he had helped to plant when a boy. Our village of Batavia is 



