24 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



about returning to first principles, you want to return to first 

 principles, and the crop demanded in this case is a crop of 

 trees. This is philosophically true, theoretically and prac- 

 tically true. 



Take the pine, for instance. It takes its sustenance 

 almost entirely from the atmosphere. It is like the saints, 

 — it has very little of the earth about it. It is among the 

 most upright of created things. It lifts itself into the air, 

 and through its leaves absorbs from the atmosphere that 

 poisonous carbonic acid gas that we are throwing into it 

 every time that we exhale our breath, which is ever rising 

 from decaying vegetable matter, and from every fire, and 

 which would poison the air but for this elementary action of 

 the plant growth. The pine, through its leaves, absorbs 

 this carbonic acid gas, exhales the oxygen, making the air 

 fit for us to l)reathe again, and retains the carl)on for its 

 growth. It is true that some of this gas is brought down by 

 the rain and the snow and is absorbed by the trees through 

 their roots, but undoubtedly a far larger proportion is 

 absorbed through the leaves, and perhaps the leaves are 

 more emphatically the mouths of the plant than they are 

 the lungs. Pines take a little pinch of earth, largely as 

 potash. Burn, if you please, an acre of pine wood, and 

 that which it took from the atmosphere returns to the 

 atmosphere. That which it took from the earth remains in 

 ash, and you know how very little it is. Hence it is philo- 

 sophically, theoretically and practically true that poor land, 

 so called, will produce good timber. 



I speak especially of the pine (P. Strobus) because it is 

 the most valuable of our timber trees and because a greater 

 proportion of your waste and cheap land is better adapted 

 to the growth of pine than to other good timber trees. 

 It will grow in a swamp or on sandy barrens. It will 

 grow almost everywhere. It requires of the land a firm 

 foothold and a little water to drink. Now, you take al- 

 most any of the waste land here in Massachusetts, in this 

 climate, just on the sunny side of the midway line between 

 the eternal heats of the equator and the eternal ice of the 

 pole, here where you have forty or more inches of annual 

 rainfall, — and you have practically no land but what will, 



