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Scotch acres, intermixed -with other kinds of forest trees. This plant- 

 ation was upon a hill-side, from two hundred to four hundred feet 

 above the sea-level. - The ground was rocky, and covered with loose 

 masses of mica slate, the whole gi-ound not worth £3 a year. His 

 successor, John, first conceived the idea of planting the larch, to the 

 exclusion of all other species, upon the hill-sides about Dunkeld. 

 Before his death, he planted over four hundred acres on the sterile 

 hill-sides of his estate. Plis son, Duke John, continued his father's 

 plans. His father died in 1774, and in 1783 the young Duke had 

 planted two hundred and seventy-nine thousand trees. Hetween 

 1786 and 1791, he planted six hundred and eighty acres, with five 

 hundred thousand larches. 



Thus he continued to prosecute the work of larch planting upon 

 the barren hill-sides until 1826, when he and his predecessors had 

 planted more than fourteen millit)ns of larch trees, covering more 

 than ten thousand acres. It is estimated that a forest ])lanted with 

 larches will, in seventy-t^vo years from the time of planting, furnish 

 timber for building the largest ships. Befiire this time, the trees 

 will have been thinned, leaving about four hundred trees to an acre. 

 Allowing fifty cubic feet of timber to a tree, at a shilling a foot, and 

 you will have the product of £1000 per acre, of the poorest land, 

 consisting of rocks and shivered fragments of schist. It is stated, 

 that the v,diite larch on the duke"s plantation, sixteen hundred feet 

 above sea-level, eighty years after it was planted, produced three hun- 

 dred cubic feet of timber fit for any use. The larch is superior to the 

 Scotch pine, and will, in half a century, make as mnch wood as the 

 pine will in a century. The Scotch larch resembles the American 

 larch or hacmatack, as it is called. 



There is much sandy land in Central Massachusetts, that might 

 successfully be planted with the seeds of the white pine, v/hich is a 

 rapid grovver. The cones mature so that they may be gathered in the 

 winter, and they do not open so that the seeds can escape by 

 Nature's processes until early spring, the best time for artificial sow- 

 ing. The seeds, says Loudon, require from thirty to fifty days tc^ 

 germinate, and sometimes do not come up until the succeeding spring, 

 and even later. Until the fifth year they are of very slow growth and 

 require protection — after which the growth is rapid, — increasing froni- 

 one to three feet annually. Moses Field of Leverctt, a member of 

 the committee, to whom we are indebted for specimens of the annual 

 growth of several species of forest trees, left v,-ith us a white pine, 



