ON TIMBER. 289 



any other. Fruit trees are often killed in the wood, 

 by excessive bearing ; and therefore it is natural to 

 suppose that a similar excess must injure the wood of 

 an oak. Now, it generally happens that in the same 

 species, whether in the same or in different varie- 

 ties of the same species, the productions run largest 

 when they are most numerous. Hence the acorns 

 of the oak having the inferior timber are the most 

 profitable for the gatherer both to gather and to sell ; 

 and those two circumstances are quite sufficient to 

 bring them to the market in preference to, and even 

 exclusive of, the other, more especially as the pur- 

 chaser is to grow seedlings and not oak timber. The 

 question of the timber is, indeed, a question seventy 

 years hence with those who deal in acorns and seed- 

 ling oaks, and as they have small chance of hearing 

 any complaint that may be made about the quality, 

 they of course give themselves very little concern 

 about it. 



But still granting that the acorns are those of an 

 inferior oak, and that there are those mercantile 

 considerations in favour of their use, that is no jus- 

 tification of the breeder or the planter of the oak. 

 An acorn is not an oak ; there is merely that in it 

 which will, in time, make an oak out of other ma- 

 terials, if it is put properly in the way of so doing. 

 Nor is there any reason that an acorn should not 

 be made to produce a better oak, than the one upon 

 which it grew. " Improving the breed" is con- 

 stantly done by those who rear domestic animals, 

 and has been done in the case of cultivated plants, 

 more especially those that are used as human food, 

 from the beginning of history, and before it, for 

 we meet with the names of those cultivated plants 

 which have separate types in a wild state, in the 

 most ancient histories ; and those plants must have 

 been cultivated out of something. The most learned 

 botanists of the present day cannot be absolutely 

 certain about the original potato ; various species 

 Bb 



