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exhausted by age. Crops of woocl are now raised with as 

 much regularity and certainty as crops of hay or grain, and 

 are profitably taken off every twenty to thirty years. On 

 thirteen acres of cut off land, which I purchased in 1851 at 

 nine dollars an acre, there is now a crop of wood, principally 

 oak, averaging fifteen feet in height, mostly sprung from the 

 roots of the previous growth, and growing with great rapidity, 

 from their large and abundant roots ; while in almost every 

 vacancy the seedling pines, before named, are shooting up their 

 spires, and dispute with the oak for the final possession of the 

 soil. 



The white birch and the white maple push out numerous 

 sprouts from almost every tree which is cut down, and spread 

 spontaneously as seedlings, on the road-sides and on the mar- 

 gin of forests. A large hill in full view of my house, which 

 was clear pasture land twenty-five or thirty years ago, is now 

 an unbroken forest. 



It belonged to the late Eev. Gardner B. Perry, who, with a 

 view to improving his pasture, caused furrows eight or ten feet 

 apart to be ploughed round the hill, keeping as near horizontal 

 as possible, with the tripple purpose of retaining the rain, 

 ploughing up some of the moss, and manuring the intermediate 

 space by the washing down of some of the soil ploughed up. 

 The plan seemed well adapted to improve a smooth hill-side 

 pasture, which it probably would have done, but that a copse 

 of birches, forty rods off, furnished seed, and the winds did the 

 sewing ; and now we see a full grown and heavy crop of birch 

 trees. Another neighbor's intervening lot remained un- 

 ploughed, and is now smooth pasture land. 



Another reason why our wood increases so fast is, as before 

 named, the great increase of the use of coal as fuel. Twenty- 

 one years ago, I was, with one exception, the only householder 

 making use of coal in the town ; now it is in use in almost 

 every family ; and for the two last years, nearly eight hundred 

 tons have been imported and consumed — taking the place, ac- 



