RESULTS OF FOREST PLANTATION. 383 



more costly extension and creation of tliem where they have been 

 unduly reduced or have never existed, are among the plainest dic- 

 tates of seK-interest and most obvious of the duties which this age 

 owes to those that are to come after it. 



Financial Besults of Forest Plantation. 



Upon the whole, I am persuaded that the financial statistics 

 which are found in French and German authors as the results of 

 EurojDcau experience in forest economy, present tlie question un- 

 der a too unfavorable aspect ; and therefore these calculations 

 ought not to discourage landed proprietors from making experi- 

 ments on this subject. These statistics apply to woods whose 

 present condition is, in an eminent degree, the effect of previous 

 long-continued mismanagement ; and there is much reason to be- 

 lieve that in the propitious cUmate of the United States new 

 plantations, regulated substantially according to the methods of 

 De Courval, Chambrelent, and Chevandier, and accompanied with 

 the introduction of exotic trees, as, for example, the Australian 

 casuarina and eucalyptus * — which latter, it is said, has a growth 



* Altliougli the eucalyptus thrives admirably in Algeria — where it attains a 

 height of from fifty to sixty feet, and a diameter of fifteen or sixteen inches, 

 in six years from the seed — and in some restricted localities in Southern Eu- 

 rope, it can not be expected to flourish in any part of the United States except 

 the extreme South and California. The writer of a somewhat enthusiastic 

 article on this latter State, in Harper's Monthly for July, 1872, affirms that he 

 saw a 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." On the cul- 

 tivation of the eucalyptus, see Lambert, Eucalyptus Culture, etc., Paris, 1873. 

 The growth of the eucalyptus in Italy, though rapid, is far less so than in Al- 

 geria and in California. It hardly flourishes at aU north of the Apennines, 

 being very frequently winter-killed. At Intra, however, on Lago Maggiore, 

 which enjoys an exceptionally mild winter climate. Prince Trubetzkoy has 

 established a large plantation comprising thirty or forty species of eucalyptus, 

 which do not appear to suffer from frost. I can not learn from inquiries in 

 respect to California, that any specific observations have been made there upon 

 the supposed sanitary properties of this tree. On the Campagna of Kome, how- 

 ever, at the Abbey of the Le Fontane, where the Italian Government has estab- 

 lished a penal station for the employment of one hundred and fifty convicts in 

 agricultural labor, plantations of eucalyptus were begun in 1869 with so favor- 

 able effects on the health of the Frati that the authorities were encouraged to 

 extend its cultivation, and no less than twenty-five thousand eight hundred of 

 these trees were planted there in the year 1881. Some of these trees, dating 



