1877. | 207 [Price. 
gone, and those further north-west are rapidly going, leaving no succession 
in kind, and the Oaks and Hemlocks are fast departing, which are some- 
times cut down to get the bark for the tanner, with but the contingent 
chance of selling the wood for cross ties and lumber. When felled both 
objects should certainly be secured. 
Landreth & Co., buy worn-out lands cheaply ; buy them near navigable 
waters, for cheap transportation by water, sow or plant nuts of chestnut, 
walnut and hickory, or sow the seeds of the white pine, which they find to 
grow in the South, and leave the yeliow pine seeds to sow themselves. 
They see a boundless area of timber growth before them and others ; trees 
of slow return ; but know that the market will await its maturity, and will 
be ever a rising one, as the country shall become more shorn of timber, 
denser in population, and more demand the consumption of timber. The 
profit awaited will be surely compensatory for capital, labor and interest 
thus invested ; and though for many years unproductive of annual income, 
the timber crop when it matures will be found to cover all the investment, 
with no interest of capital expended, bat there self-invested by ligneous 
increment. It isan inheritance laid up for heirs ; a good to them ; a good 
to the nation. Yet the harvest is not all postponed, and to be but once, at 
distant period ; for the process may be one of successive thinnings of small 
trees thickly planted, and of old trees of different kinds maturing at dif- 
ferent times, thus bringing repetitions of profits. The sowings of nature 
and the plantings of man may also ‘be in every successive year, and 
diffi rent tracts thus yield annual returns as trees are fit to cut. The plant- 
ings should be annually repeated as the woods shall be thinned. It should 
be a rule, except in needed thinnings, never to cut down thrifty trees that 
are yet rapidly making wood. An economical instinct will teach all this 
to the provident forest proprietor, As certainly as the axe and portable 
saw mills cut up the best timber of the forest, as they surely are rapidly do- 
ing, the plantings of man, and the protected growths of nature, should fol- 
low with equal pace, with selections of kinds most profitable, except where 
cleared land is fit and required fer agriculture. The whole country has 
but its 25 per cent., while there are excessive quantities in large tracts in 
some sections, and no forests in other vast areas. This shows another dis- 
tribution of trees must be a work of the future. 
Philadelphia should not overlook the interest she has in keeping well 
wooded the sources of the Schuylkill, the river that gives her chief supply 
of water. The Schuylkill Navigation Company began this beneficent 
work of supply of water and wooded protection by building their mag- 
nificent mountain reservoirs, and buying wooded tracts, by the shade of 
trees to protect the springs that supply them. 
It will also be to the interest of the city to build, in the future, more 
mountain reservoirs, and protect their supply of trees, that she may have 
adequate stores of waters, there to meet the exigency of summer drouths, 
when her population shall have increased. The secured wooded water 
sheds, and the plantings in progress in Fairmount Park subserve the same 
