6 GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF NEW JERSEY. 



The wooded zone of Southern New Jersey, which is known 

 as u The Pines," has some sharp contrasts between its coarse, 

 sandy soils, covered by the pitch pine almost exclusively, its 

 heavier soils, with mixed oak and pine, its white-oak bottoms, 

 its white-cedar swamps and its mixed swamp lands. The size of 

 the holdings is large, running up to tens of thousands of acres. 

 The ravages of fire and the severe cutting have left scarcely any 

 large timber, and the original forest has disappeared from these 

 wide stretches of pine lands and cedar swamps. Owing to the 

 frequency of fires over a large part of the Pines belt the timber 

 is oak coppice and stunted pines. The cedar continues thrifty 

 and springs up quickly after cutting. The care of the forest, 

 excepting that of a few individual tracts and of two or three 

 companies, is practically of no value in promoting a better 

 growth, and the lack of some forceful system of protection 

 makes any forestry experiments impracticable. 



The forests in the agricultural districts of the State are dis- 

 tributed somewhat irregularly, and the proper proportion of 

 woodland to improved land in farms is not maintained through- 

 out these districts. In some parts of the Raritan valley the 

 cleared area is continuous for miles, and the fringe of trees 

 bordering the brooks is about all that is left of what was a 

 heavily-timbered valley. The valleys of the limestone and slate 

 in Warren county are also bare of forest. Throughout the 

 southern-central part of the State, and particularly in the green- 

 sand-marl zone, the woods are well distributed among the farms 

 and make a pleasing diversity in the landscape, as well as answer- 

 ing the claims of forestry in the proper relation of cleared land 

 to forest. It would be well in places to let some of the more 

 rocky hill-tops and the steep hill-sides be left for planting with 

 valuable timber trees, and the ravines and gullies as well as the 

 thin soils, which are too poor for profitable farming, and allow 

 them to grow up in wood. A reduction in the average size of the 

 farms would lead to what is termed "more intensive farming," 

 and the increased acreage in woodland would add to the total 

 production by its crop of timber, particularly if some care were 

 taken in seeding the wood-lots with more valuable timber trees, 

 and the cuttings were not so severe as at present. An educated 

 public opinion favoring the keeping of these lands, which are 



