COPPICES. BY) 
over, as is found most convenient in practice, the young shoots 
have neither the shade nor the protection from wind so impor- 
tant to forest growth, and their progress is comparatively slow, 
while, at the same time, the thick clumps they form choke the 
seedlings that may have sprouted near them.* The evergreens, 
once cut, do not shoot up again,t and the mixed character of 
the forest—in many respects an important advantage, if not an 
indispensable condition of growth—is lost ;{ and besides this, 
methods must be pursued; in civilized regions, where a dense population re- 
quires that the soil shall be made to produce all it can yield, the regular arti- 
ficial forest, with all the processes that science teaches, should be cultivated. 
It would be absurd to apply to the endless woods of Brazil and of Canada the 
method of the Spessart by ‘‘double stages,” but not less so in our country, 
where every yard of ground has a high value, to leave to nature the task of 
propagating trees, and to content ourselves with cutting, every twenty or 
twenty-five years, the meagre growths that chance may have produced.” 
* In ordinary coppices, there are few or no seedlings, because the young 
shoots are cut before they are old enough to mature fertile seed, and this is one 
of the strongest objections to the system. 
t+ It was not long ago stated, upon the evidence of the Government forest- 
ers of Greece, and of the queen’s gardener, that a large wood has been discov- 
ered in Arcadia, consisting of a fir which has the property of sending up both 
vertical and lateral shoots from the stump of felled trees and forming a new 
crown. It was at first supposed that this forest grew only on the ‘‘ moun- 
tains,” of which the hero of About’s most amusing story, Le Roi des Montagnes, 
was ‘‘king;” but stumps, with the shoots attached, have been sent to Ger- 
many, and recognized by able botanists as true natural products, and the fact 
must now be considered as established. Daubeny refers to Theophrastus as 
ascribing this faculty of reproduction to the éAary or fir, but he does not cite 
chapter and verse, and I have not been able to find the passage. The same 
writer mentions a case where an entire forest of the common fir in France had 
been renewed in this way.—Trees and Shrubs of the Ancients, 1865, pp. 27-28. 
The American Northern pitch possesses the same power in a certain degree. 
According to Charles Martins, the cedar of Mount Atlas—which, if no tidenti- 
eal with the cedar of Lebanon, is closely allied to it—possesses the same 
power.-—Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1864, p. 315. 
¢ Natural forests are rarely, if ever, composed of trees of a single species, 
and experience has shown that oaks and other broad-leaved trees, planted as 
artificial woods, require to be mixed, or associated with others of different 
habits. 
In the forest of Fontainebleau, ‘‘ oaks, mingled with beeches in due propor- 
