292 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



set out in a mere sand-bank, any time in May. I would say 

 that I would like to plant them just as the buds were swell- 

 ing, or perhips open, bnt not having made much growth. 

 I planted last year some live hundred or a thonsand of those 

 pines to cover up some barren spots near my place ; one of 

 them, a spot above my corn-house, where it is nothing but 

 sand. Hardly one of those pines has died ; they have gone 

 through this summer, the driest summer I ever saw, without 

 apparent injury. Of course they were planted a year ago 

 this spring. There is no difficulty in transplanting pines. 



Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lived near my house, who 

 died this last year, had a piece of white pines, of about four 

 or five acres, that he gave some twenty-five years ago to 

 Henry D. Thoreau, of whom you have all heard as being a 

 very singular man (I suppose if he had lived at the present 

 day they would have called him a philosopher), who lived 

 as a hermit on the banks of Walden Pond, to plant white 

 beans. Thoreau, to illustrate how cheaply a man could 

 live, undertook to live on the white beans that he grew on 

 that land that would not groAV anything but white pines. 

 Fire has run through that grove of white pine; still, there 

 is a thick growth of pines, and there are plenty of pines 

 more than one foot through to-day. 



Then, so fiir as forest planting is concerned, it would be 

 very interesting to any gentlemen who happened to be in 

 the eastern part of the State to go down near Lynn to visit 

 a place formerly owned by Richard S. Fay, and perhaps in 

 the family now. There are more than a hundred acres, 

 covered with a growth of American and European trees, 

 many of them trees which Mr. Fay planted within forty or 

 fifty years, and, as Mr. Bowditch informs me they have sold 

 a good many thousand dollars' worth of that wood. 



The subject before this meeting is not so much tree-grow- 

 ing as the protection of our present forests from fire. I do 

 not know what action this meeting desires to take upon that. 

 I have no plan to suggest. Some gentlemen may have a 

 plan, Mr. President, and therefore I will not occupy your 

 time further. 



Mr. Manning. I should begin to plant the trees as soon 

 as frost was out of the ground, and I should continue it into 



