PLANTING AND GROWING TREES. 57 



richly reward labor and care in thinning, trimming, 

 and transplanting you may profitably employ in 

 them any time that you can spare them but they 

 will do very well if simply let alone. And, unlike any 

 other product with which I am acquainted, you may 

 take crop after crop of wood from the same lot, and 

 the soil will be richer and more productive after 

 the last than it was before the first. Whether wholly 

 because their roots permeate and break up the soil 

 during their life and enrich it in their decay, or for 

 diverse reasons, it is certainly true that land and 

 especially poor land is enriched by growing upon 

 it a crop of almost any timber, the evergreens pos- 

 sibly excepted. So, should you ever have land that 

 you cannot till to profit, whether because it is too 

 poor, or because you have a sufficiency that is better, 

 you should at once devote it to wood. 



II. Your springs and streams will be rendered more 

 equable and enduring by increasing the area and the 

 luxuriance of your timber. They may have become 

 scanty and capricious under a policy of reckless, whole- 

 sale destruction of trees ; they will be reenforced and 

 reinvigorated by doubling the area of your woods, 

 while quadrupling the number, and increasing the 

 average size, of your trees. 



III. All ravines and steep hill-sides should be 

 devoted to trees. Every acre too rocky to be thor- 

 oughly cleared of stone and plowed should be set 

 apart for tree-growing. Wherever the soil will be 

 gullied or washed away by violent rains if under till- 



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