PRESIDENTS ADDRESS AND DISCUSSION. IO9 



a failure. It depends on the nature of the fireclay. The 

 bings will do if you prepare them, but not on oil works' refuse 

 unprepared." 



Mr Milne Home. — " My experience is that almost any kind 

 of bing, if it is fairly fresh, will grow grey alder or white alder." 



Mr James Whitton. — "The ordinary pit bings, where you get 

 a mixture of shales and stones, will grow trees, more especially 

 alder. Mr Whitelaw, of Gartshore, obtained the most successful 

 results I have seen, but what can you do with oil shale ? I 

 have not even seen a weed growing. There have been bings 

 at Nitshill for forty or fifty years, and there is not a blade of 

 grass growing there." 



Mr Cadell. — "There are some sorts of shale which contain 

 iron pyrites, and when sulphuric acid is formed by the decom- 

 position of the pyrites it kills all vegetation, but there are others 

 quite free from this in which plants will grow." 



Mr Whitton. — " The ordinary mixture of a coal-pit bing will 

 grow a lot of things, but the pure shale will not." 



Mr Cadell. — " Some of the pure spent oil shale grows things 

 perfectly well, and natural brushwood is appearing with rough 

 grass and herbage on the abandoned bings near Linlithgow." 



Mr George Leven said : — " We, fortunately, have been in the 

 position in this country of being able to supply a certain amount 

 of timber, and the question now, I think, is more what we are 

 going to do in the way of re-afforestation. It is not altogether a 

 question of what we are to plant. In the first place, and, I think, 

 it is a matter that we ought to consider seriously and place 

 before the nurserymen, there is the collection of seeds and to see 

 what seeds are to be collected first. If the plants that you want 

 are not in the country, what are you going to do.? It takes 

 three or four years before plants can be planted out, as we have 

 seen, and, I think, therefore, that we ought to begin to consider 

 from the initial stages what is really required. Dr Borthwick 

 said he did not doubt home pit-wood had come to stay. I 

 firmly believe that is the case, and if it is, it behoves us to go 

 about our business in a quite different way from what we 

 would do if we were meaning to produce only timber of large 

 scantlings. We must prepare the way with the best growing 

 species. 



" Probably we will hear to-day, as we have had in the 

 newspapers recently, an advocacy of spruce-planting. That in 



