298 FORESTRY IN NEW ENGLAND 



tion. There are to-day large areas of abandoned farm land which 

 will be reforested by natural or artificial means within the next 

 few decades. This land, although useful for agricultural pur- 

 poses, is not as yet needed. The opening up of more fertile 

 western lands threw it out of cultivation forty to eighty years 

 ago, and until a very decided agricultural development takes 

 place it will be best kept in forest. The very sandy and gravelly 

 soils should always be kept forested, and this class of land, 

 together with swamps, steep slopes, and the tops of the higher 

 hills, constitute the true forest soils of the region. 



While white pine is the chief tree it is far from forming the 

 entire forest, as there is often a mixture of hardwoods and 

 conifers. The pine occurs both in pure stands and in mixture 

 with the hardwoods, and the latter often form pure stands with 

 no mixture of conifers. Hemlock and pitch pine occur as im- 

 portant conifers, and the southern white cedar {chamaecy paris 

 thyoides) is present in commercial quantities in the swamps of 

 southeastern Massachusetts. 



The principal hardwoods are red oak, chestnut, soft maple, 

 gray birch, white oak, and white ash. The red oak found com- 

 mercially in portions of the northern hardwoods region and the 

 chestnut, an infrequent tree there, become in the white pine 

 region two of the most important hardwood trees. As a general 

 rule the pine is most abundant on the poorer sandy and gravelly 

 soils, the hardwoods taking the lead on the better soils. An 

 exception to this is found on abandoned farm lands, which often 

 seed up to pure stands of pine, and these lands, while not the 

 best in the region, cannot usually be classed with the poor sandy 

 lands. 



The inferior species, gray birch and soft maple, are two of the 

 hardwoods most abundantly found. Indeed, this region is the 

 optimum one for the development of gray birch, and very favor- 

 able for soft maple. Sugar maple and yellow birch are numeri- 

 cally important on some of the cooler sites, but do not figure as 

 trees of general commercial importance. The white oak is most 

 abundant in the eastern half of the Massachusetts portion of the 



