PRACTICAL MAHOGANY PLANTING 



563 



L,an(l suitable for growing mahogany trees can be bought 

 in almost any section of the West Indies and the Spanish 

 Main for less than two dollars an acre. In fact, free 

 concessions can be procured from some of the govern- 

 ments in Central and South American countries for estab- 

 lishing mahogany plantations. 



It is difficult to show just how profitable it will be to 

 grow mahogany trees on a commercial scale. The ques- 

 tion will naturally be asked when returns may be expected 

 and how great these returns will be. The first trees 

 should be ready for felling in twenty or twenty-five 

 years, but by that time the market price of mahogany 

 will undoubtedly be much higher than today, since there 

 is no danger of over-production. The advantage of 

 having these trees on a comparatively small area re- 



duces the expense of getting the logs to market and 

 increases the profit over that in getting the logs from 

 the natural forest. The initial cost of establishing the 



Expenditures: 



Clearing lOO acres for planting $ 1,275 



Nursery stock 600 



Preparing holes and planting 1,125 



Total cost first year $ 3,000 



Cleaning and supplying first and second year.... 1,500 



Care and maintenance up to sixtieth year 11,400 



Interest on the money invested 14,10a 



Total cost $30,000 



plantation is not very high. An estimate of the cost of 

 farming a mahogany plantation of one hundred acres 

 and the probable financial results are given above, labor 

 costing fifty cents a day. 



DISAPPEARANCE OF OUR HARDWOODS 



A GOOD deal is said from time to time about the 

 '* lessening supply of timber in this country, due to 

 lumbermen, land clearing, and fire ; but there is reason 

 to believe that the American forests were losing out 

 before men had anything to do with the matter and that 

 more kinds of trees had disappeared than now remain. 

 A bulletin compiled by Frank Hall Knowlton and pub- 

 lished by the Department of the Interior at Washington, 

 says the Hardwood Record, indicates, if it does not prove, 

 that our forests were richer in trees, particularly hard- 

 woods, a great many thousands of years ago than they 

 were at the time of the discovery of America. The 

 evidence is found in the records of geology, where im- 

 prints of leaves have been preserved in the rocks, telling 

 of species which were living at the time the clays were 

 deposited which later changed into rock. 



An examination of the lists of leaves thus preserved 

 shows that many species once growing in America are no 

 longer found here. For example, there are now two 

 species of persimmon in the United States. There were 

 once seventeen species. Fifteen have disappeared. The 

 record goes back to Cretaceous time, some hundreds of 

 thousands of years ago. 



There were eighteen species of yellow poplar. Only 

 one remains. Some of the most ancient had leaves 

 shaped much like those of willows, except that the apex 

 was cut ofif, with the telltale notch which identifies 

 yellow poplar to this day. 



There is now a single species of red gum, but twenty- 

 three species once grew in the American forests. 



There were twenty-three kinds of elm then, and five 

 are here now. 



Our single species of sassafras is all that remains of 

 the twenty-five species which once grew on this continent. 



We still have three sycamores, one in California, one 

 in Arizona, and one east of the Rocky Mountains, but 

 there were once thirty kinds. 



There are now four kinds of walnut in this country, 

 but thirty-five kinds grew here in the past. 



Our forests are still well supplied with magnolias, there 

 being seven ; but thirty-nine species grew in America at 

 former periods. 



Cottonwoods, including the aspens and balm of Gilead, 

 still number ten species in the United States, and it is a 

 generous number ; but no fewer than eighty-three species 

 left records in the rocks during past ages. 



Two fig trees survive, both in Florida ; but these are 

 the lone survivors of ninety-nine species which once grew 

 wild in the American woods. 



But the most interesting of all the record of oak. 

 This is now the most abvmdant hardwood of the United 

 States. It is most abundant in actual amount of wood 

 and also in number of species. There are now fifty-two 

 in this country ; but these are no more than the respectable 

 representatives of 126 kinds of oak which once grew here. 



^'The foregoing figures should be qualified in one par- 

 ticular. In most instances the past records are pre- 

 served by leaf prints in stone or clay, and the print of a 

 leaf does not tell how large was the tree from which it 

 came. Some of those enumerated above may have been 

 only shrubs, or small plants. There is no way of 

 certainly determining that fact when the tree itself was 

 never seen, and no part of the trunk has been preserved. 

 The leaf is the most perishable part of a tree, next to 

 the flower ; yet all we know of scores of tree species 

 which once grew in this country is derived from leaf 

 impressions in mud and mud itself is not usually re- 

 garded very durable. Yet, how much valuable knowledge 

 has been obtained from such perishable things as leaves 

 and nuid ! Some of them have come down to us through 

 a million years. By the aid of such records it is possi- 

 ble to understand i)retty accurately what our ancient 

 forests contained and what they would have looked like, 

 if a human being could have been there to see them. 



