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for the use of woody plants, the great, and indeed paramount 

 importance of subsoils cannot fail to strike the reader. In 

 fact, the latter may be said, in a great measure, to command 

 and render subordinate the actual properties of the former, 

 rendering them favourable or unfavourable, according to 

 their own peculiar character. The first question that is 

 asked by a skilful planter, on surveying a place for the first 

 time, is not respecting the soil, but the subsoil. If that be 

 propitious, he is comparatively indiflerent as to the superin- 

 cumbent strata. All soils are susceptible of melioration, from 

 the most silicious to the most argillaceous. Their pernicious 

 ingredients can often be modified, if they cannot be altered, 

 as we have already seen ; but subsoils are the gift of nature, 

 for evil or for good, and always lie beyond the reach of our 

 improvement. In order that the reader may form a right 

 judgment of both their favourable and unfavourable proper- 

 ties, for the growth of wood, the following short view is sub- 

 joined of the merits of both. 



The most favourable subsoils are those, through which 

 the excess of water, received in rainy seasons, is allowed 

 slowly to percolate, and which retain moisture suflBcient for 

 the sustenance of plants. First, close-lying strata ; in which 

 a considerable proportion of sand and fine gravel is intimately 

 mixed. Secondly, free-stone ; provided a bed of hard and 

 impermeable clay do not intervene between it and the soil, 

 which sometimes happens. And thirdly, a kind of green- 

 stone (Scottice, rotten whin,) which is the most favourable 

 of all, when there is over it a sufficient depth of mould, for 

 the above purposes. Such, for example, are the soil and 

 subsoil of that favourite tract of country, at the foot of the 

 Ochill and other hills in Stirlingshire and Perthshire, so well 

 known for the growth of its timber. Here it descends in a 

 gradual slope, from the hills towards the river Forth, both 

 east and west of the town of Stirling, while the river slowlv 



