93 



ges might be supposed to attend the ai1, that ulone is sufli- 

 cicnt to neutrahze or counterbalance them. It was this 

 weighty objection, brought forward by Miller, that first led 

 me to bestow particular attention on the suhject, and to seek 

 for some general theory or principle, which, if founded on 

 the laws of nature, as affecting woody plants, under differ- 

 ent circumstances of climate and soil, might serve to regu- 

 late and improve the practice. 



But, independentl}' of all partial faults, that might be found 

 with transplanting, as now generally practised, Miller objects 

 to all transplantation whatever, whether of young trees oi 

 old. Every tree, he holds, in order to reach the greatest size 

 and perfection, of which it is susceptible, should be raised at 

 once from the seed : To remove it at all, is sensibly to dete- 

 riorate it. Therefore, it follows, that if, by removal when 

 young, it suffer injury, it must, by the same process when 

 old, suffer much greater injury. On this opinion of the ex- 

 pediency of sowing the seeds of trees, instead of transferring 

 plants from the seed-bed to the nursery, and thence to the open 

 plantation, he is not singular, as the doctrine has been sup- 

 ported, both before and since his time, by very eminent ph)'- 

 tologists : While others, of no small weight and name, have 

 as strenuously taken up the adverse side of the question, and 

 maintained, that plants may not only be safely transferred 

 from the seed-bed to the nursery, before being planted out, 

 but that woods raised with such materials possess advanta- 

 ges, which those at once springing from the seed can never 

 possess.* These different systems, within the two last cen- 

 turies, have been widely propagated, and as keenly supported ; 

 and, as the mass of mankind never think for themselves, it 

 so happens, that the art of transplanting has its friends and 

 its enemies, its advocates and its opponents, among the learned 

 and the unlearned. 



* NOTF 1. 



