870 QUALITY OF TIMBER. 
shorter, its top less tapering, its foliage denser and more 
inclined to gather into tufts, its branches more numerous and of 
larger diameter, its wood shows much more distinctly the 
divisions of annual growth, is of coarser grain, harder and more 
difficult to work into mitre-joints. Intermixed with the most 
valuable pines in the American forests, are met many trees of 
the character I have just described. The lumbermen call them 
“saplings,” and generally regard them as different in species 
from the true white pine, but botanists are unable to establish 
a distinction between them, and as they agree in almost all 
respects with trees grown in the open grounds from known 
white-pine seedlings, I believe their peculiar character is due 
to unfavorable circumstances in their early growth. The pine, 
then, is an exception to the general rule as to the inferiority of 
the forest to the open-ground tree. The pasture oak and 
pasture beech, on the contrary, are well known to produce far 
better timber than those grown in the woods, and there are few 
trees to which the remark is not equally applicable.* 
*Tt is often laid down as a universal law, that the wood of trees of slow 
vegetation is superior to that of quick growth. This is one of those common- 
places by which men love to shield themselves from the labor of painstaking 
observation. It has, in fact, s0 many exceptions, that it may be doubted 
whether it isin any sense true. Most of the cedars are slow of growth; but 
while the timber of some of them is firm and durable, that of others is light, 
brittle, and perishable. The hemlock-spruce is slower of growth than the 
pines, but its wood is of very little value. The pasture oak and beech show a 
breadth of grain—and, of course, an annual increment—twice as great as trees 
of the same species grown in the woods; and the American locust, Robinia 
pseudacacia, the wood of which is of extreme toughness and durability, is, of 
all trees indigenous to North-eastern America, by far the most rapid in growth. 
Some of the species of the Australian Hucalyptus furnish wood of remarkable 
strength and durability, and yet the eucalyptus is surpassed by no known tree 
in rapidity of growth. 
As an illustration of the mutual interdependence of the mechanic arts, 
I may mention that in Italy, where stone, brick, and plaster are almost the 
only materials used in architecture, and where the ‘‘hollow ware’? kitchen 
implements are of copper or of clay, the ordinary tools for working wood are 
of a very inferior description, and the locust timber is found too hard for their 
emper., At the same time the work of the Italian stipcttai, or cabinet-makers, 
