LETTER FROM ELIS NILSON. 123 



VIII. Letter from E. Jagmastare Elis Nilson, Stockholm, 

 Sweden t regarding his visit to Larch-woods in Scotland. 



Stockholm, St/i December 1899. 



My Report on the Larch will be made first about the New 

 Year. As, however, the greater part of it will treat of local 

 Swedish circumstances, and, accordingly, will not, in its entirety, 

 be of any great interest to Scottish readers, I beg instead now 

 to be allowed to concentrate, in the form of a letter, my impres- 

 sions of the visit I made to the Scotch larch- woods. 



As I had the honour of mentioning at our last meeting, I came 

 to Scotland in the hope that the Scotch larch, being acclimatised 

 under northern conditions similar to ours, would, if trans- 

 mitted to Sweden, there prove to be possessed of more power of 

 resistance than the tree directly imported from southern Europe — 

 a view which 1 founded on the circumstance, among others, that 

 the Scotch fir is thriving excellently here, and is suffering much 

 less from disease than the German fir, which has proved itself 

 quite unsuitable to our conditions. But these hopes were rather 

 chilled when, on my arrival in Scotland, I learned there was so 

 much anxiety regarding the future existence of the Scotch larch- 

 woods, and in the despondency of the hour I had nearly given the 

 thing up and returned home. But happily I carried out my pro- 

 gramme, and availing myself as much as possible of the recom- 

 mendations and plans very kindly placed at my disposal, I had 

 the opportunit)', in many different parts of Scotland, including 

 Dunkeld, to study larch woods of from 3, 6, 8, 15, 2b, and so on 

 even up to 80 and 100 years of age. However, I had, against all 

 expectations, the good, or perhaps bad luck, whichever you may 

 call it, to light almost exclusively upon sound larch-woods. But 

 I have noted down, as a pleasing and important fact, that pretty 

 and quite sound larch-woods do exist of all ages, from the very 

 youngest even to those of ripe age. True enough, I have ever 

 and anon seen individual tires affected with the cancer, but those 

 were very few, and I did not see any larch- wood which impressed 

 me as being doomed to a premature death. But I noticed several 

 young or middle-aged lir-woods, which would certainly never be 

 able to grow up to timber-wood. I also observed a great deal of 

 diseased Norway spruce-wood {A. exceha), and in the places where 

 silver fir and Douglas fir were growing in larger numbers, it was 



