GROWING TIMBER TREE -PL ANTING. 51 



means, their fertilizers, upon half to two-thirds of 

 the area they now skim and skin, and giving the 

 residue back to timber-growing. 



In my own hilly, rocky, often boggy, "Westchester 

 probably within six of being the oldest Agricul- 

 tural County in the Union I am confident that ten 

 thousand acres might to-morrow be given back to 

 forest with profit to the owners and advantage to all 

 its inhabitants. It is a fruit-growing, milk-producing, 

 truck-farming county, closely adjoining the greatest 

 city of the New World ; hence, one wherein land can 

 be cultivated as profitably as almost anywhere else 

 yet I am satisfied that half its surface may be more 

 advantageously devoted to timber than to grass or 

 tillage. Nay ; I doubt that one acre in a hundred 

 of rocky land that is, land ribbed or dotted with 

 rocks that the bar or the rock-hook cannot lift from 

 their beds, and which it will not as yet pay to blast 

 is now tilled to profit, or ever will be until it shall 

 be found advisable to clear them utterly of stone 

 breaking through or rising within two feet of the sur- 

 face. The time will doubtless arrive in which many 

 fields will pay for clearing of stone that would not 

 to-day ; these, I urge, should be given up to wood 

 now, and kept wooded until the hour shall have struck 

 for ridding them of every impediment to the steady 

 progress of both the surface and the subsoil plow. 



Were all the rocky crests and rugged acclivities of 

 this County bounteously wooded once more, and kept 

 so for a generation, our floods would be less injuri- 



