OF FRUIT AND FOREST TREES. 381 



growths ; and the efforts of nature to heal the 

 wounds thus necessarily given (before the rising 

 of the sap in the following spring) have been judged 

 best for the safety and health of the tree. The 

 danger of performing this service when the juices 

 are in a more vigorous flow, as in the months of 

 May, June, and July, has been dreaded, from a 

 fear of its occasioning a waste of the nutritive 

 juices, discharging themselves through the wound, 

 to the impoverishment and injury, if not the ruin, 

 of the tree. 



The pruning of fruit-trees and the lopping off 

 large branches from forest-trees during the Winter 

 season, has also been frequently attended with 

 great hurt and impediment to their health and ve- 

 getation ; the wounds being exposed to all the ri- 

 crours of an inclement season, and thereby con- 

 tracting those diseases which contain the princi- 

 ples of decay. Hence it is that such numbers of 

 forest-trees are continually injured in their value 

 for public uses, either by unskilful management 

 or purposed depredation, or by the violence of 

 boisterous winds, when, their limbs and branches 

 being torn off, the trees are left in that unprotect- 

 ed state to imbibe the seeds of decay and rotten- 

 ness, which will in time pervade their very heart, 

 and render them unfit for any of those valuable 

 purposes for which nature, by their frame and tex- 

 ture, appears to have designed them. 



It may also be observed, that where branches 



