GROWTH OF FOREST TREES. 393 
and partly from an experience which, though not pronouncing 
definitively in a single season, will, nevertheless, suggest appro- 
priate methods of planting and training the wood within a 
period not disproportioned to the importance of the object.* 
The growth of arboreal vegetation is comparatively slow, and 
we are often told that, though he who buries an acorn may hope 
to see it shoot up to a miniature resemblance of the majestic 
tree which shall shade his remote descendants, yet the longest 
life hardly embraces the seedtime and the harvest of a forest. 
The planter of a wood, it is said, must be actuated by higher 
motives than those of an investment, the profits of which con- 
sist in direct pecuniary gain to himself or even to his posterity ; 
for if, in rare cases, an artificial forest may, in a generation or 
two, more than repay its original cost, still, in general, the 
value of its timber will not return the capital expended and the 
interest accrued.+ 
* For very judicious suggestions on experiments in sylviculture, see the Rev. 
Frederick Starr’s remarkable paper on the American Forests in the 7’ransac- 
tions of the Agricultural Society for 
+ According to Clavé (Ktudes, p. 159), the net revenue from the forests of 
the state in France, making no allowance for interest on the capital repre- 
sented by the forest, is two dollars per acre. In Saxony it is about the same, 
though the cost of administration is twice as much asin France; in Wiirtem- 
berg it is about a dollar an acre; and in Prussia, where half the income is 
consumed in the expenses of administration, it sinks to less than half a dollar. 
This low rate in Prussia and other German states is partly explained by the 
fact that a considerable proportion of the annual product of the wood is either 
conceded to persons claiming prescriptive rights, or sold, at a very small price, 
to the poor. Taking into account the capital invested in forest-land, and add- 
ing interest upon it, Pressler calculates that a pine wood, managed with a 
view to felling it when eighty years old, would yield one-eighth of one per 
cent. annual profit; a fir wood, at one hundred years, one-sixth of one per 
cent. ; a beech wood, at one hundred and twenty years, one-fourth of one per 
cent. ‘The same author gives the net income of the New Forest in England, 
over and above expenses, interest not computed, at twenty-five cents per acre 
only. In America, where no expense is bestowed upon the woods, the value 
of the annual growth has generally been estimated much higher, 
Forest-trees are often planted in Europe for what may be called an early 
crop. ‘Thus in Germany acorns are sown and the young seedlings cultivated 
like ordinary field-vegetables, and cut at the age of a very few years for the 
