CANADIAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION 125 



Dr. FILIBERT ROTH. I would like to " chip in" one little bit on this discussion. 

 I would say that when Colonel Fox started in New York, he had a thousand trees 

 measured and the rings counted. They were good trees and I trust my memory 

 to say that without exception they grew slowly for the first fifty years, but much 

 faster after that. That was in the Adirondack Mountains, where there is a great 

 variety of soil. The average spruce throughout the New England States and the 

 Adirondack Mountains is usually not bigger than my arm at thirty years, and it is 

 after that age that it becomes a real tree. This curve which Mr. Ross showed us is 

 perfectly conclusive evidence and will repeat itself for every hundred trees measured, 

 but it does not tell the whole story. The early part of the growth is worth nothing, 

 it is the latter part that is worth the money. The early part of the growth is 

 nothing but soft and brushwood, so do not be carried away by width of ring. These 

 things are misleading. I do not wish to contradict Dr. Bell, but this is a line of 

 investigations which foresters have carried on for a hundred years and more, 

 and this very same curve has been made time and time again, and it is a universal 

 figure that every forest student gets thoroughly soaked into his head. There is the 

 diameter growth and then the volume growth; and do not forget another point, 

 and that is the price growth, which just now is worth more than everything else 

 put together. 



So far as Mr. Knechtel's statements are concerned the pictures we saw last 

 night were poor representations perhaps, and were too few in number. But he is ab- 

 solutely right. We have in the Old World to-day experience which has been 

 carried on over not a few years, but for hundreds of years. The woods I ran 

 through as a young man were woods that our grandfathers had planted there, and 

 our experience was, not obtained on a cabbage patch scale, it was over thousands 

 of- acres and those woods had paid their rent, at a rate that our Michigan farm 

 lands could not begin to keep up with. 



Dr. FERNOW. In the northern country it takes still longer for our spruce 

 to come to a given size than it does in lower latitudes. These misleading statements 

 as to the rapid rate of growth are bad, because they make people think that a 

 forest can be reproduced faster than it really can. If you expect to have a new 

 crop even every fifty years you will soon find that you are mistaken. 



Mr. LITTLE. Talking about Mr. Fox's, thousand trees of twelve inches and 

 upwards measured to ascertain their age, I remember distinctly that out of these 

 thousand spruce trees, only four were found to have reached that size in less than 

 100 vears. 



