64 History of the English Landed Interest. 



to sustain many sheep, but wliere the larch would be likely 

 to flourish. He alludes to the successful experiments of the 

 Duke of Athole, whereby larches planted in 1743 were at the 

 time he was writing eight feet in circumference ; and he de- 

 mands for his protege, not the room of, but a place beside the 

 oak as being fully as durable for naval purposes, quite as useful 

 for domestic wants, and at the same time capable of growing 

 on such light soils as would not support the oak.^ Another 

 correspondent of the same magazine calls upon the commis- 

 sioners to form themselves into a company, invite subscriptions 

 not exceeding five millions sterling, buy all the waste lands, 

 and cultivate them at a profit with oak trees." 



Unfortunately all this enthusiasm was expended at a time 

 when the advantages of draining, pruning, and thinning were 

 unknown, and large tracts of young timber perished for the 

 want of the open gutter, handsaw, and billhook.^ A revulsion 

 of feeling consequently set in at the commencement of the 

 present century, and for some years arboriculture became 

 neglected. Men began to call out for another Evelyn, and 

 one Dr. Hunter responded to the invitation with the best 

 means at liis disposal. He brought out a .fourth edition of the 

 f^ylva in 1776, which was said by the reviewers to have revived 

 the ardour which the first edition had excited. It called the 

 squires from their winter season in London, and set them to 

 work once more in laying the foundations of a future Navy. It 

 persuaded them, as Columella and Cowper had tried to do, 

 that God made the beautiful country, and man the ugly town ; 

 and that though, as Dr. Johnson gloomily reinarked, there is a 

 frightful interval between the seed and the timber which their 

 short span of remaining life could never bridge over, yet the 

 open-air pursuit of tree-planting was more conducive to long 

 life than the close rooms and crowded streets of a town exist- 

 ence. Hunter taught the smaller gentry how planting could 



1 Gent:s Mag., p. 505, 1791. 



2 Id. Ibid., Dec. 15th, 1791, p. 1190. 



^ Arthur Youn<2;, for example, do[)i-ocatod the practice of pruning. " All 

 sorts of pruninjj;," he says, " for timber trees is execrable." — Annals of 

 A;iricrdtnr(', vide foot-note, vol. ii. p. 190, 1784. 



