142 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTfSH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



and a working-plan for CYery estate and parish and county 

 in Scotland, with a rotation of, say, 150 years. Such a 

 survey and working-plan would have cost a good round 

 sum of money, but a mere flea-bite compared with the harvest 

 to be reaped. That is to say, then, that all thriving forests would 

 have been allowed to grow on till they were a size sufficient to 

 produce all descriptions of building timbers, and all intermediate 

 sizes, of course, also. Had that been done, even as late as the 

 first year of the nineteenth century, we should now possess 

 millions of acres of mature wood, and we would be independent, 

 if we pleased, of all other countries, so far at least as pines and 

 spruces are concerned. At this stage of my illustration I want 

 to criticise mildly the attitude of architects and joiners, and 

 dealers in foreign wood generally, as regards our native pine 

 woods. The experts in forestry lend no countenance to their 

 views, I may say, however. One would think, to listen to those 

 gentlemen, that our ancient castles, and churches, and schools 

 and cottages had from time immemorial been built of foreign 

 red pine and Baltic or American spruce ; but, of course, that was 

 not so. It was first the exhaustion of our older native forests, 

 and then the exceeding cheapness of foreign importations, which 

 brought about the change in our building material. The virgin 

 forests along the Baltic, Norwegian and American coasts could 

 then be bought for an old song, and the freights cost less, 

 generally, than the haulage from even comparatively short 

 distances of the old Scottish woods. But the result has been 

 that our grand old Scottish red wood, or Scots fir, has lost caste 

 with the users of building material, and is now marketed, to a 

 great extent, comparatively young, perhaps at seventy years ot 

 age, with undeveloped heart-wood. It is used for such special 

 purposes, apart from building wood, as railway sleepers and 

 all sorts of box woods and barrel woods, etc., etc., and so it has 

 come about that the foreign timber men will tell you that 

 Scots fir cannot now be grown either in size or quality to 

 compare with his importations of red wood, or even with the 

 Scots fir our ancestors used. But our critics almost invariably 

 make an exception in favour of some particular wood of great 

 age, in their own district. The Ross-shire man excepts some 

 grand old Lovat or Balnagowan woods, perhaps ; the Nairnshire 

 man must, of course, except the magnificent old woods near 

 there, where there are still thousands of firs, which for size and 



