194 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY, 
hang down its perpendicular side, and the trench filled up by the 
machine. By drawing the bar carefully back the tops of the plants 
are released, and the work completed, the filling up of the trench 
having left the surface perfectly level. This machine gets over the 
ground more rapidly than the spade, but is only suitable for the 
very finest soils, free from stones and other obstacles. The cost of 
planting with this machine is reckoned to be about 3d. less per 
1000 than by hand and spade. 
Planting in the forest is done with a planting iron in the form 
of a wedge, a smaller wooden implement of the same shape being 
used for the seedlings. Three or four plants are usually put in on 
every square prepared patch, from which the grass has been removed 
by a kind of broad hoe, the corners of which are turned down. 
This hoe is a very handy implement for removing the turf, and is 
also used for clearing lines for sowing where the plough cannot be 
used. The larger plants (two years) are put in by women, a man 
preceding them and making the holes with the large iron, which 
the women fill in with the hand in the sandy ground, The seedlings 
are put in in the same way, except that the large implement is dis- 
pensed with, and the worker makes the holes and plants at the 
same time. Slit-planting seems to be never adopted, although pit- 
planting is practised in underplanting and similar cases, The cost 
of sowing a hectare in the manner described is about 40 marks, 
of which the ploughing costs 15 marks and the seed 18 marks, 
so that the labour does not come to much. Planting costs about 
60 marks per hectare. 
After the ground is once stocked with young plants, nothing 
more is done until the first thinning takes place, which is usually 
between the twenty-fifth and thirtieth year after sowing. If the latter 
has been a successful one, the young plants will not stand more 
than 3 or 4 inches apart in the rows at the age of four or five 
years, so that by the time of the first thinning the struggle for 
existence will have been a very severe one, and none but the 
stronger plants will have survived it. This thinning, however, is 
chiefly confined to the cutting out of dead wood and suppressed 
trees, and any dominant trees that stand immediately beside each 
other, so that it can hardly be termed thinning in the ordinary 
sense of the word. ‘The larger trees at this age will not average 
more than 6 inches or 7 inches in diameter at the surface of the 
ground on soils of the best class, while the majority are below this 
size. Their height growth, however, is very marked, and is greater 
