AMONG THE PINES AND FIRS 203 



properly managed, are a decidedly remunerative 

 way of utilising the land, as they often yield 

 extremely good returns on the capital invested in 

 them. Indeed, wherever purely actuarial consid- 

 erations may govern Forestry, the greatest profit 

 for land below the average in quality, and not in- 

 frequently also for some of the average classes 

 of woodland soil, will usually be in coniferous 

 crops treated with a rotation of about seventy or 

 eighty years. And this will be all the more 

 apparent if plantations of timber have first to be 

 formed on vacant land in place of being merely 

 regenerated from crops already growing on the 

 ground. 



There are, of course, drawbacks even to the culti- 

 vation of conifers, because they are more exposed 

 to many serious kinds of damage than crops of 

 broad-leaved trees. Grown in dense masses, pines 

 and firs are liable to breakage by heavy snow, and 

 to be thrown en masse by strong gales, as in 1893 

 damages from which the deciduous larch suffers 

 least of all the conifers. Then they have each their 

 own particular scourges in the shape of noxious 

 beetles and moths, and of fungous diseases, which 

 effect a foothold wherever the crops are either 



