6Q MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



twent3'-five 3'ears much of such land will return to wood. He 

 begins to believe that the care of forests can be made a profitable 

 pursuit. To raise clear timber is going to require the care of an 

 educated man. He will ascertain that he can grow a white pine 

 in good soil in one-fifth of the time ordinarily required, and by 

 proper pruning he can produce clear lumber. Pruning pine trees 

 is done on different principles from those applied to deciduous 

 trees ; the small limbs should be cut off a foot from the trunk, 

 and in a year the remaining portion will be dead. Clear timber 

 will command a much higher price in the future than it does now, 

 and the speaker predicted that we shall have a supply. 



Deciduous trees gain if the ground is enriched around them ; he 

 has elms planted in good ground thirty-six years ago that are 

 now nine feet in circumference. Pines planted in 1846 are now 

 suitable for mill logs. Larch makes good timber for inside work ; 

 he had trees of thirty years' growth which furnished timber eight 

 inches by ten and about thirty feet long ; some of it increased an 

 inch and a half in diameter in one season. 



Mr. Chase said that he had seen the evils of deforesting land, 

 and to remedy it we must attend to two points — first, education, 

 and second, legislation ; the latter cannot amount to much with- 

 out the former. Some men never look at a tree without thinking 

 how many feet of lumber, or how many cords of firewood can be 

 got out of it. Some of the grand old trees planted by the Pilgrims 

 are now left to the worst part of our population, while the 

 descendants of the Pilgrims flock to six-story buildings in cities. 

 Last year two rare trees were cut down in Roxburj', which were 

 planted by the late Samuel Walker, one of the presidents of this 

 Society — a cedar of Lebanon and a fine specimen of the decid- 

 uous cypress of the Southern States. 



In Nova Scotia the speaker had seen acres of forest burnt over 

 for the sake of the blueberries which came in two or three years 

 afterwards, and the same devastation for the same purpose north 

 of Calais, Me. At Mount Shasta in California he saw where 

 trees hundreds and thousands of years old, had been burnt by 

 hunters. At a redwood lumbering camp he saw a tree fifteen 

 feet in diameter and two hundred and fifty feet high cut down. 

 All the marketable wood was saved and the light portions were 

 burned. He suggested forming roadways three I'ods in width 

 through forests to prevent the spread of fire. The cutting off of 



