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SYLVICULTURE. BY Gl 
Another advantage of the artificially regulated forest is, 
that it admits of such grading of the ground as to favor the 
retention or discharge of water at will, while the facilities it 
affords for selecting and duly proportioning, as well as prop- 
erly spacing, and in felling and removing, from time to time, 
the trees which compose it, are too obvious to require to be 
more than hinted at. In conducting these operations, we must 
have a diligent eye to the requirements of nature, and must re- 
member that a wood is not an arbitrary assemblage of trees to 
be selected and disposed according to the caprice of its owner. 
“ A forest,” says Clavé, “is not, as is often supposed, a simple 
collection of trees succeeding each other in long perspective, 
without bond of union, and capable of isolation from each other ; 
it is, on the contrary, a whole, the different parts of which are 
interdependent upon each other, and it constitutes, so to speak, 
a true individuality. Every forest has a special character, de- 
termined by the form of the surface it grows upon, the kinds 
of trees that compose it, and the manner in which they are 
grouped.” 
The art, or, as the Continental foresters rather ambitiously 
call it, the science of sylviculture has been so little pursued in 
England and America, that its nomenclature has not been in- 
troduced into the English vocabulary, and it would not be pos- 
sible to describe its processes with technical propriety of lan- 
guage, without occasionally borrowing a word from the forest 
and carvers in wood, who take pains to provide themselves with tools of better 
metal, is wholly unsurpassed in finish and in accuracy of adjustment as well as 
in taste. When a small quantity of mahogany was brought to England, early 
in the last century, the cabinet-makers were unable to use it, from the defective 
temper of their tools, until the demand for furniture from the new wood com- 
pelled them to improve the quality of their implements. In America, the 
cheapness of wood long made it the preferable material for almost all purposes 
to which it could by any possibility be applied. The mechanical cutlery and 
artisans’ tools of the United States are of admirable temper, finish, and con- 
venience, and no wood is too hard, or otherwise too refractory, to be wrought 
with great facility, both by hand-tools and by the multitude of ingenious 
machines which the Americans have invented for this purpose. 
