22 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc, 



Growi]s^g Timbt^r as a Crop 

 ON THE Waste and Other Cheap Lands 



OF Massachusetts. 



BY HON. J. D. LYMAN, EXETER, N. H. 



Mr. Chairmau, ladies and gentlemen : Up in New Hamp- 

 shire we consider the last thing- a person can do is to " take 

 to the woods," but it seems that Mr. Sessions, at this ses- 

 sion, proposes it as the first thing to l)e done after the pre- 

 liminaries. 



I do not come here to tell you anything new. I come 

 simply to invite your attention to that which you undoubt- 

 edly know as well as I know, although perhaps you have 

 not given it that intense attention which I have. I come to 

 save that which has been lost, for, according to the census 

 report of 1880, more than one acre out of ten in your farms 

 has been turned out as waste*, as dead land, so to speak, and 

 this amount is nearly equal to one-fourth of your entire 

 forest area. Now, I come to ask you to apply science and 

 common-sense to the production of timber on these and other 

 cheap lands. You know the savages leave everything to the 

 production of nature. Instead of growing cows and steers 

 and pigs and sheep, they chase the deer and bears and hunt 

 coons and woodchucks, and live on the wild products of 

 nature. 



A few years ago it was a very common thing in our sec- 

 tion of the country, and I believe in Massachusetts, for the 

 boys and girls to trample down acres of grass and spend 

 days of time to get a few quarts of small strawberries. 

 Now in a few minutes we go into our gardens and pluck 

 them' by the bushel. That is science and sense applied to 

 the cultivation of the strawberry. 



Now, we have never, with very slight exceptions, applied 

 science and sense to the production of a crop of timber, and 



