COPPICES. 363 



au important advantage, if not an indispensable condition oi 

 growth — is lost ; * and besides this, lai'ge wood of any species can 

 not be grown by this method, because trees which shoot from 

 decaying stumps and theu' dying roots, become hollow or other- 

 wise unsound before they acquire their full dimensions. A more 



must now be considered as established. Daubeny refers to Theophrastus as 

 ascribing this faculty of reproduction to the kla-rj or fir, but he does not cite 

 chapter and verse, and I have not been able to find the passage. The same 

 writer mentions a case where an entire forest of the common fir in France had 

 been renewed in this way. — Trees and Shrubs of the Ancients, 1865, pp. 27-28. 

 The American Northern pitch-pine possesses the same power in a certain de- 

 gree. 



According to Charles Martins, the cedar of Mount Atlas — which, if not 

 identirnl with the cedar of Lebanon, is closely allied to it — possesses the same 

 power. — liecue dcs Deux Mondes, July 15, 1864, p. 315. 



Prof. Sargent states that: "The California 'Eed ^ood' {Sequoia semper- 

 vivens) sends from its stump suckers in immense numbers and of great vigor, 

 a peculiarity not shared, however, by its near relation the 'Big Tree.' The 

 genus Torreya has the same peculiarity, which is a very rare one among con- 

 ifers, — at least the two American species of that genus sprout freely from the 

 stump." 



* Natural forests are rarely, if ever, composed of trees of a single species, 

 and experience has shown that oaks and other broad-leaved trees, planted as 

 artificial voods, require to be mixed, or associated with others of different 

 habits. 



In the forest of Fontainebleau, " oaks, mingled with beeches in due propor- 

 tion," says Clave, "may arrive at the age of five or six hundred years in full 

 vigor, and attain dimensions which I have never seen surpassed ; when, how- 

 ever, they are wholly unmixed with other trees, they begin to decay and die 

 at the top, at the age of forty or fifty years, like men, old before their time, 

 weary of the world, and longing only to quit it. This has been observed in 

 most of the oak plantations of which I have spoken, and they have not been 

 able to attain to full growth. When the vegetation was perceived to languish, 

 they were cut, in the hope that this operation would restore their vigor, and 

 that the new shoots would succeed better than the original trees ; and, in fact, 

 they seemed to be recovering for the first few years. But the shoots were soon 

 attacked by the same decay, and the operation had to be renewed at shorter and 

 shorter intervals, until at last it was found necessary to treat as coppices plan- 

 tations originally designed for the full-growth system. Nor was this all : the 

 soil, periodically bared by these cuttings, became impoverished, and less and 



less suited to the growth of the oak It was then proposed to introduce 



the pine, and plant with it the vacancies and glades By this means, the 



forest was saved from the ruin which threatened it, and now more than 10,000 

 acres of pines, from fifteen to thirty years old, are disseminated at vai'ious 

 points, sometimes intermixed with broad-leaved trees, sometimes forming 

 groves by themselves." — Revue des Deux Mondes, Mai, 1863, pp. 153, 154. 



