142 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



is looking, not at a new country, but at one which was once 

 peopled by a highly-cultivated community, who have been long 

 since swept away with every vestige of their wealth and refine- 

 ment except their stately groves and verdant lawns. 



I have thus far spoken of our forests merely as a predomi- 

 nant and magnificent feature of American scenery ; but it is 

 scarcely necessary to say that they have other claims to our 

 attention of a far more solid character. It is to our forests 

 that we have been indebted for two hundred years for our fuel 

 and our shelter. How much of the progress of New England, 

 at least since its first settlement by our forefathers, has been 

 owing to the liberality of Nature in this particular ! What- 

 ever were the calamities, in other respects, of those much- 

 enduring men, they were at least exempted from the extreme and 

 probably fatal suffering to which they would have been subject- 

 ed in a thinly-wooded region. Had the aborigines possessed that 

 determined and unsparing hostility to large trees which seems 

 to have actuated many of their successors, it is probable that 

 these northern settlements would never have had a being. 



One of the most remarkable of the forest trees of the 

 United States is the white pine — called in England the Wey- 

 mouth pine, and known by botanists as the Pinus strobus. 

 This tree must be familiar to many of our readers in various 

 ways, as it abounds in our neighborhood, and as its branches 

 are more frequently employed than those of any other tree for 

 the decoration of our Catholic and Episcopal churches. It 

 may be distinguished at first sight from every other evergreen 

 growing in this State by the lightness and delicacy of its 

 foliage, as well as by its less formal mode of growth. On 

 a closer view it is found to differ from all our other New 

 England pines or spruces in being what is called five-leaved — 

 that is, in putting forth its leaves in sheaths, each containing 

 five. 



This tree is certainly the most majestic in the country when 

 it reaches its full growth in our forests. Though it does not 

 spread in a graceful sheaf like the elm, nor rise up in a regu- 

 lar spire like the fir, it more than compensates for the want 

 of these beauties by its loftiness. None of the productions 

 of the Atlantic States approach it in this particular. It is 



