i6o Forest-Culture. 



cone, in regular angular lines from bottom to top. I find by measurement 

 that one standing in my grounds, unobstructed by other trees, is ten inches 

 diameter of trunk at base ; twelve feet diameter across the lower circle 

 of limbs, which incline in a straight line to the top, which is twent}'-five 

 feet in height. So uniform are the}', that in a row of a hundred and fifty 

 trees set in a right line, which are twenty feet in height, one would not 

 observe any unevenness as he looked along the line. No tree puts forth its 

 foliage so early as this. Even before the frost wholly leaves the ground, 

 its buds start. 



The last peculiar feature that I will notice in this article, yet by no means 

 the least important, is its adaptability to all dry soils. It is asserted that 

 the lands on which the Duke of Athol planted his extensive forests were 

 nearly barren of vegetation ; and yet his forest of larch, when it had been 

 planted thirty years, was worth five hundred pounds sterling per acre. 

 Also, that, according to the " measurement of the duke himself, trees which 

 he planted in 1743 and 1744, measured, at the age of fifty-two years, from 

 nine feet two inches to ten feet in diameter four feet from the ground, and 

 a hundred feet in height." This growth must, I think, fully equal that of 

 mine planted on our rich prairie soil. It is asserted that the tree is a self- 

 fertilizer ; that the falling of the foliage annually forms from a quarter to 

 half an inch of soil : therefore the soil grows richer under the growing crop. 

 The rocky and comparatively barren hills and worn-out lands of New Eng- 

 land are peculiarly adapted to this timber. According to the most careful 

 estimates, the income from a single acre of larch, in thirty years, is not less 

 than five thousand dollars. This amount is taken from the acre in four 

 harvests, or thinnings, one in six years from planting, another in twelve 

 years, the third in twenty, and the fourth in thirty years, leaving a forest 

 of over three hundred trees per acre, at twelve feet apart, to grow on to 

 fifty or seventy-five years of age, when the trees are a hundred feet in 

 height and three feet and more in diameter, and worth at least thirty dollars 

 a tree, or nine thousand dollars. Z>. C. Scqficld. 



