RESULTS OF FOREST PLANTATION. 395d 
said, has a growth at least five, and, according to some, ten times 
more rapid than that of the oak—would prove good invest- 
ments even in an economical aspect.* 
There is no doubt that they would pay the expenses of their 
planting at no distant period, at least in every case where irri- 
gation is possible, and in very many situations, terraces, ditches, 
or even horizontal furrows upon the hillsides, would answer as 
a substitute for more artificial irrigation. Large proprietors 
would receive important indirect benefits from the shelter and 
the moisture which forests furnish for the lands in their neigh- 
borhood, and eventually from the accumulation of vegetable 
mould in the woods.t The security of the investment, as in 
the case of all real-estate, is a strong argument for undertaking 
such plantations, and a moderate amount of government patron- 
eucalyptus ‘‘ eight years from a small cutting, which was seventy-five feet in 
height, and two feet and a half in diameter at the base.” 
The paulownia, which thrives in Northern Italy, has a wood of little value, 
but the tree would serve well as a shelter for seedlings and young plants of 
more valuable species, and in other cases where a temporary shade is urgently 
needed. The young shoots, from a stem polled the previous season, almost sur- 
pass even the eucalyptus in rapidity of growth. Such a shoot from a tree not 
six inches in diameter, which I had an opportunity of daily observing, from 
the bursting out of the bud from the bark of the parent stem in April till 
November of the same year, acquired in that interval a diameter of between 
four and five inches and a height of above twenty feet. 
* The economical statistics of GRIGOR, Arboriculture, Edinburgh, 1868, are 
very encouraging. In the preface to that work the author says: ‘‘ Having 
formed several large plantations nearly forty years ago, which are still standing, 
in the Highlands of Scotland, I can refer to them as, after paying every expense, 
yielding a revenue equal to that of the finest arable land in the country, 
where the ground previously to these formations was not worth a shilling an 
acre.” See also HArtTIG, Ueber den Wachsthumsgang und Hrtrag der Buche, 
Hiche und Kiefer, 1869, and especially BRYANT, Forest Trees, chap. ix. 
+ The fertility of newly cleared land is by no means due entirely to the accu- 
mulation of decayed vegetable matter on its surface, and to the decomposition 
of the mineral constituents of the soil by the gases emitted by the fallen 
leaves. Sachs has shown that the roots of living plants exercise a most pow- 
erful solvent action on rocks, and hence stones are disintegrated and resolved 
into elements of vegetable nutrition, by the chemical agency of the forest, 
more rapidly than by frost, rain, and other meteorological influences. 
