288 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



land. There is a great deal of this light plain land there, 

 which is of very little value. One of the centre family of 

 Shakers has experimented for a great many years on those 

 plains with white-pine seed. He gets the seed by going to 

 some old white-pine trees and picking up the cones in a 

 wagon and carrying them to the barn, or some shed, and 

 there he lets them dry. In the winter he husks them out 

 with a rake. His long experience has shown him that the 

 best way to plant the seed is merely to strew it right over 

 the ground. He has tried transplanting a great many years, 

 and he has finally concluded that no matter what the nature 

 of the soil is, whether a sandy plain or a rocky hill, the way 

 is to strew the seed on top of the ground : there are places 

 on those sandy plains where he planted the seed in that way 

 years ago, where the trees are now quite large. A few 

 years after the first planting, he planted others, which are 

 also growing, and so on down to within a few years. In 

 another, on top of a hill, where the soil is hard and rocky, 

 and the field is full of every kind of tough grass and small 

 briers, he put the seed on in the same way. There is now 

 a srrowth of trees there from two to three feet high. 



Mr. . I beg your indulgence, Mr. Chairman, and 



the indulgence of this audience for a moment. I have suf- 

 fered some loss myself from forest fires. Some fifteen 

 years ago I had fifty acres burned over, and also the fence 

 on three sides of it. It has not recovered to this day. I 

 have never received any remuneration for that loss and 

 never expect to. It not only spoiled the woodland, but the 

 pasture. It has grown up within a few years to poplar, and 

 has almost become a forest. They are now using poplar for 

 making paper, and perhaps some one who lives after I am 

 dead may find a profit from cutting those poplars. 



Now, in regard to the same wood coming up on the same 

 ground, I have had a little experience in that. When I 

 was a boy, perhaps twelve or fifteen years old, I helped my 

 father cut off" from a piece of land a lot of beech. That was 

 the wood that was on the piece. Immediately there sprung 

 up what we call dog cherry — a complete swamp. I never 

 saw the like. Those poles grew up thirty, thirty-five or 

 forty feet, and we cut them down for fencing-poles. As 



