No. 4.] TIMBER AS A CROP. 23 



I think it is very strange indeed, — strange, since you can 

 grow timber as well as you can grow corn. The first man's 

 first work was to take care of the trees which God had 

 planted for him, yet the majority of people to-day think 

 that the l)est care of a forest is to let it alone. An agricult- 

 ural editor a short time ago told me that he had an area of 

 young pines, and he would as soon have an elephant in his 

 flower o;arden as a man with an axe among those trees, — 

 contending that nature is the l)est forester. But nature, 

 with all the time since the flood, had produced in this region 

 now^ known as New England perhaps five thousand feet, 

 mostly poor timber, to the acre, that was found here by our 

 Pilgrim ancestors. About five thousand feet to the acre is 

 the crop of timber presented by nature in the great primeval 

 ^Michigan and southern pine regions and in the spruce region 

 of northern New Hampshire. Now, I contend, and I do not 

 go quite so far, perhaps, as my brother, Mr. Hersey, that, 

 by exercising common-sense and care, a man can, in from 

 forty to sixty years, grow from forty to fifty thousand feet 

 of good pine timber to the acre, — grow ten times as much, 

 if you please, in a hundredth part of the time, as nature 

 had to show our first settlers. There is no crop, no crop, 

 that will feel the touch of the hand of science and of 

 common-sense applied to it quicker than will the crop of 

 timber. You can not only grow trees of the species that 

 you want, but of the shape you desire. You can mould 

 them almost as the potter moulds the claj". 



One of the fundamental principles in all agriculture 

 (the same is true in the science of forestry) is to get the 

 proper number of plants to the acre. You can plant your 

 corn so thick that you will have no crop. You can sow 

 your grass seed so thick or thin that there will be little to 

 mow. You can have your pine trees so thick that after a 

 hundred years they will be only the size of fence poles, or so 

 scattering that each will be a pyramid of limbs. 



You have in this State, according to the census of 1880, 

 226, 6G9 acres of land that you have turned out as waste, 

 I Avish to assure you that that land is not dead ; it is not 

 necessarily barren ; that it will produce, if you will only 

 put it into the right crop. As politicians are all telling 



