An Address d^sfore the American Forestry Association. 279 



haustion of yearly demands aci*es upon acres of corn and cotton fields, 

 worn out by reckless tillage, and abandoned by the plough, are being 

 re-clothed by nature, to be sources of supply of yellow pine timber of im- 

 mediately succeeding and future generations. For ihis special variety 

 nature is thus maMng ample provision. So readily does it, the yellow pine, 

 make itself at home in light or sandy soil, that within the memory of man 

 the lower county of Delaware, and the peninsula bounded by the Chesapeake 

 and Delaware Bays has been made the favourite locality of the common 

 yellow pine, which has attained sufficient dimensions within the period 

 referred to, to be cut for saw-logs, — and this in a district of country where 

 previously pine was absolutely unknown, the forests being exclusively of 

 hard-wooded trees. But we need other than yellow pine lumber ; good as 

 it is, it does not supply every want, and unless the science and practice 

 of forestry be taught those wants are destined to go unsupplied. It is to 

 this special jjoint I desire to invite attention, and in connection with it, 

 and the subject of white pine in its northern habitat, I will here relate a 

 fact which may, I feel confident is, destined to exert an important influence 

 on the future sources of supply ; indeed, I do not hesitate to predict may 

 prove the starting-point to interests of fabulous extent, in the light of 

 which cotton itself as a product exclusive to the south, may lose somewhat 

 of its lustre. A gentleman of Virginia, a friend of mine largely interested 

 in lands, a shipper of timber from the seaboard, therefore not inexperienced, 

 discovered in his forest explorations what, for want of a better term, I 

 shall call a white pine settlement, in the dense yellow pine forests of the 

 northern neck of his State. In the midst of a group of white pines, ex- 

 tending over an area of five or six acres, stood a gigantic individual tree, 

 ninety-six feet high, eight feet four inches in circumference three feet from 

 the ground. There it stood and stands to-day, surrounded by seedlings 

 from forty feet high down to seedlings of a year old, as the boundaries of 

 the settlement are reached, numbering in the whole three to four thousand. 



Here is a fact which cannot be questioned. It is like the testimony of 

 the rocks. A bird of passage had evidently dropped a solitary seed at some 

 period long preceding, which springing up had established itself in its new 

 home, far distant from the region where nature had placed its ancestors. 

 The mere fact itself of a white pine having fixed its abode and prospered 

 in a remote locality is but a trifle — a circumstance of but little practical 

 significance ; but taken in connection with inferences not to be ignored, 

 its value can hardly be over-estimated. The proof is made patent that 

 this tree of northern habit thrives equally well with the southern pine (of 

 which there are several species, commercially classed as Carolina) in the 

 latter's native sand, and under the scorching sun of the south, opens a 

 vista in forest tree planting, which those who look beneath the surface 

 cannot fail to appreciate. // is the index to future wealth of inconceivable 

 magnitude. 



In the science of forestry trees are divided into two distinctive classes — 

 one called encroaching, which perpetuate and increase themselves under 

 favourable conditions ; the other receding, which disappear before the 



