454) CruickshanFs Practical Planter. 



ordinary productiveness. When planted, it had been covered with heath, 

 and in that state had not been superior to those waste lands which we 

 occasionally see improved at a vast expense, and which will produce no 

 kind of crop till they receive a great quantity of manure. 



" Those who have never had an opportunity of seeing old woodlands 

 brought into cultivation, will scarce credit what has now been advanced. 

 That the soil should be enriched by the production of wood, when the 

 experience of ages has proved that it is always exhausted by other crops, 

 will seem to them a paradox of the most extravagant kind. If such readers, 

 however, will be at the trouble to give a little attention to the following 

 suggestions, the fact may appear to them much less unaccountable. 



" Trees draw their nourishment from a much greater depth than any of 

 the grasses, roots, or different kinds of grain raised by the agriculturist. 

 Most of the latter derive the whole of their subsistence from the part of the 

 soil that lies within a few inches of the surface ; but the former, from the 

 superior strength and magnitude of their roots, are enabled to penetrate 

 much farther, and extract food from the very rock which forms the sub- 

 stratum of a great proportion both of our cultivated and uncultivated 

 grounds. This, though it does not account for lands being positively 

 enriched by wood, makes it, at the same time, far less surprising that trees 

 should grow to a larger size, and yet not exhaust the upper part of the soil 

 in so great a degree as most of the crops cultivated by the farmer. 



" There is another circumstance which gives ground in wood a great 

 advantage over that in tillage, which is, that the leaves of the trees are 

 suffered to decay and rot where they fall ; and, by this means, an annual 

 addition is made to the depth of the vegetable mould. Now, the leaves of 

 a tree may be considered as bearing the same proportion to the trunk and 

 branches, in respect of the nourishment which they require, as the straw of 

 corn bears to the grain : but the manure which cultivated land receives is, 

 in general, little more than the straw which grows on it after it has served 

 for food or litter to cattle. Ground in wood, then, actually receives, in 

 the annual fall of the leaves, as much enrichment as the farmer bestows on 

 his land under tillage. 



" Ground employed in agriculture is exposed, at almost every season of 

 the year, to the full action of the atmosphere, and in the drought and heat 

 of summer much of its strength is evaporated. In land covered with wood 

 the case is entirely different ; as, from the shade afforded by the leaves and 

 branches, very little evaporation takes place. This, then, is another reason 

 that serves, in some measure at least, to explain the seemingly paradoxical 

 fact in question ; for, that evaporation has a very powerful tendency to 

 exhaust a land, by drawing off and dissipating the more volatile part of the 

 matter which assists in the process of vegetation, there can be no doubt, 

 when we consider that any kind of dung may be deprived of the greater 

 part of its strength by being long exposed to a dry atmosphere. Nor is it 

 merely by preserving its own original substance, that land in wood has the 

 advantage of cultivated ground. Whatever is extracted from the latter in 

 the form of vapour, falls again, when condensed, in the shape of rain or 

 dew ; but, instead of descending wholly on the same spots from whence it 

 rose, it is of course diffused over the whole space which the clouds con- 

 taining it may happen to cover ; and woods and moss have as good a chance 

 of receiving it, on its return to the earth, as the ground in tillage. The part 

 of it which falls, either on the cultivated fields or the naked wastes, may be 

 again evaporated before it has had time to be productive of any benefit ; 

 but the portion of it which the woodlands imbibe is retained to enrich the 

 soil ; for, the umbrage excluding the rays of the sun, there is no possibility 

 of its being extracted a second time^ Land covered with trees, therefore, 

 while it never loses any thing, receives, with every fall of rain or of dew, a 

 tribute from the riches of the cultivated part of the country. The advan- 



