62 MASSACHTISETTS HOIlTICULTril.\L SOCIETY. 



to the south it remains bare. The trees will not grow, the young 

 plants being scorched to death by the sun, and this is true of 

 some of the level country where the land has been exhausted by 

 tillage. Of course the forest would ** skirmish around " and would 

 cover such places in time, conquering them slowly from the edges. 

 But such object lessons are instructive, if we have eyes to see 

 them. The chief things required for the successful management 

 of small tracts of woodland are to prot.ect them from fire and from 

 pasturage, and then to let them m."istly alone. The trees will do 

 best under the eoncUtions which have produced them and have 

 always nourished them hitherto. 



The destruction of the timl^r of a forest by fire is a trivial loss 

 compai-ed with the permanent injury to the soil itself which always 

 results from forest fires. The burned land produces only inferior 

 trees, and repeated burnings destroy the soil itself. We already 

 have deserts of our own in this country created by this process 

 where the soil was once remarkably fertile. 



But taking our whole country together, pasturage is a worse 

 enemy to the forests than even fire, because it operates everywhere. 

 It works more slowly but the final result is the extinction of the 

 forest. If trees are to be grown and woodlands maintained in 

 New England, it is necessary that some land should be set aside 

 for forest uses and protected entirely from pasturage. The pas- 

 turage of woodlands is a feature of existing agricultural methods 

 in which a change might well begin which should be extended 

 to the whole matter of pasturage and its relations to the fertility 

 of the soil and to the profit and loss of farming. There can be no 

 considerable advance or improvement except by giving up some 

 esdsting practices and methods and adopting better ones in their 

 stead. A little synthetic observation would convince thoughtful 

 men that pasturage has too large a place in our present methods 

 of agriculture and that it is a wasteful and costly process, 

 especially in its effects on the fertility of the soil, I think it would 

 be an important step in a real advance in civilization if in Massa- 

 chusetts and New England the pasturage of domestic animals were 

 to a great extent gradually — and not too gradually — relinquished. 



Forestry and ai'bori culture are chiefly economical subjects. 

 Where tillage is more profitable than the production of timber or 

 trees the land should be cultivated : where wood products are 

 more profitable forest conditions should, of course, be maintained. 



