by 
FUTAIE, OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM. OTT 
to maturity, the original processes already described are re- 
peated ; and as, in different parts of an extensive forest, they 
would take place at different times in different zones, it would 
afford indefinitely an annual crop of small wood, fuel, and 
timber. 
The duties of the forester do not end here, for it sometimes 
happens that the glades left by felling the older trees are not 
sufficiently seeded, or that the species, or essences,as the French 
oddly call them, are not duly proportioned in the new crop. In 
this case, seed must be artificially sown, or young trees planted 
in the vacancies. Besides this, all trees, whether grown for 
fruit, for fuel, or for timber, require more or less training in 
are steep hillsides. But the performance of all the offices of the forester to 
the tree—seeding, planting, thinning, trimming, and finally felling and remoy- 
ing for consumption—is more laborious upon a rapid declivity than on a level 
soil, and at the same time it is difficult to apply irrigation or manures to trees 
so situated. Experience has shown that there is great advantage in terracing 
the face of a hill before planting it, both as preventing the wash of the earth 
by checking the flow of water down its slope, and as presenting a surface 
favorable for irrigation, as well as for manuring and cultivating the tree. But 
even without so expensive a process, very important results have been obtained 
by simply ditching declivities. ‘‘ In order to hasten the growth of wood on the 
flanks of a mountain, Mr. Hugéne Chevandier divided the slope into zones 
forty or fifty feet wide, by horizontal ditches closed at both ends, and thereby 
obtained, from firs of different ages, shoots double the dimensions of those 
which grew on a dry soil of the same character, where the water was allowed 
to run off without obstruction.”—Dumont, Des Travaux Publics, etc., pp. 94- 
96. 
The ditches were about two feet and a half deep, and three feet and a half 
wide, and they cost about forty francs the hectare, or three dollars the acre. 
This extraordinary growth was produced wholly by the retention of the rain- 
water in the ditches, whence it filtered through the whole soil and supplied 
moisture to the roots of the trees. It may be doubted whether in a climate 
cold enough to freeze the entire contents of the ditches in winter, it would not 
be expedient to draw off the water in the autumn, as the presence of so large a 
quantity of ice in the soil might prove injurious to trees too young and small 
to shelter the ground effectually against frost. 
Chevandier computes that, if the annual growth of the pine in the marshy 
and too humid soil of the Vosges be represented by one, it will equal two in 
ordinary dry ground, four or five on slopes so ditched or graded as to retain 
the water flowing upon them from roads or steep declivities, and six where 
