Editors Box. 201 



and fine grown oaks, it is said that during the long war there Avere 100 

 picked oaks sold out of Nun Appleton Park, by the then Sir William 

 Milner, for £100 per tree, realiziug the handsome total of £10,000. 



G. I. Cooper. 



PRUNING. 



Sir, — I would with much diffidence beg to call attention to a subject of 

 great importance in forestry that was brought before us in the first 

 number of our journal. I refer to the new theory in reference to pruning 

 advanced by Mr. Hutchison (see page 15), where he brings in the human 

 subject as an illustration of his argument. I do not call in question the 

 *' hospital statistics " which he adduces, but I object to the conclusions 

 which he draws from them. He snys that amputations when performed 

 on the human system between tlie ages of thirty and fifty years are fatal 

 in the proportion of one in two, and from that he assumes (he certainly 

 does not prove) that pruning operations performed on trees of the same 

 age will yield the same unfavourable results. Now it will occur to our 

 readers that before we can make any comparison between these two 

 subjects, there must be some essential quality in them common to both, 

 by which we can judge and decide as to the results of operations performed 

 upon them in the way mentioned. Unless we can do this the argument 

 falls to the ground, and in the present instance I am afraid that instead 

 of finding any traces of affinity between them, we shall only find indica- 

 tions of their complete dissimilarity. Por, let any one look upon a human 

 limb that has been operated upon by the surgeon's knife, and reflect upon 

 the shock that is given to the human system, so peculiarly sensitive to the 

 slightest injury, by an operation of this kind, and say if there is any 

 resemblance in it to the hard insensate wood that is cut through by the 

 woodman's san\ If there is any at all, it is so very shght that it will 

 never warrant is founding a theory upon it in regard to one of the prin- 

 cipal duties a forester has to undertake. Further, the object aimed at in 

 both cases is totally distinct, when a limb is severed from a tree it is 

 done in almost every instance in order to produce a uniform development 

 of all its parts ; whereas in the case of an amputation it is not symmetry 

 but a life that is at stake. A forester can, when occasion requires it, cut 

 the entire top oft' a tree with very little comiDunction, knowing that in a 

 few years another and perhaj^s abetter top will grow on. But the analogy 

 entirely fails when applied to a human being, seeing then that the two 

 things are quite distinct in their common properties, and are also operated 

 upon in order to accomplish diff'erent results. We are thus led up to the 

 conclusion that no reliance can be placed on a theory that founds itself 

 on a supposed analogy existing between them. I would say further that 

 there is no need whatever of going to the surgeon's books in search of 

 statistics on this question. Because we have hundreds of men all over the 



