Cruickshank's " Practical Planter." 677 



enquire in what way is pruning beneficial ? Most assuredly by 

 producing a greater quantity of straight clean timber. If, then, 

 it is acknowledged by this author, that pruning is necessary 

 to produce clean straight timber, the want of such pruning 

 must produce the reverse, viz. knottiness, short stems, and 

 large branches. 



The principle of pruning being admitted, I may be allowed 

 to ask, who is to determine or draw the line as to where this 

 principle shall cease to operate ? Are the innumerable proofs 

 that we have daily before our eyes, in every part of the 

 country, of the beneficial effects of the judicious pruning of fir 

 trees, to be quietly laid aside to allow this man of fourteen 

 years' experience (who has the impudence to ground some of 

 his nostrums on what he calls " careful calculation rather than 

 on actual experience") to say, hitherto shall it go and no 

 farther ? Certainly not ; without he can clearly show that Dame 

 Nature, who has been heretofore considered consistent in her 

 operations, has, in this case, to suit his dogmas, falsified all 

 her previous practices- 

 He has, indeed, attempted to show that the shape of the fir 

 tree is less liable to suffer from the want of pruning than that 

 of others (a fact previously very well known) ; but as to the 

 comparative increase of clean straight timber, which, as Pontey 

 incontrovertibly shows by his plates and works, can only be 

 produced to any beneficial extent by pruning, our wordy 

 author, it appears, ventures not a syllable ; unless the follow- 

 ing paragraph can be taken as such, being Cruickshank's mis- 

 quotation of Pontey's Primer, and the false conclusions founded 

 upon it of which I complain. 



Mr. Cruickshank proceeds : — " Harmless, however, the 

 process in question is far from being ; and I have known more 

 than one thriving fir plantation utterly ruined by it." Here, 

 as the advocate of pruning firs, I may, perhaps, be allowed to 

 ask the author, whether it was in the use of Mr. Pontey's 

 theory, or the abuse of it (for I have somewhere read, the 

 best of things may be abused), that such plantations were 

 " utterly ruined" ? And surely, taking the immense import- 

 ance of such an event into consideration, I shall not be deemed 

 extravagant, or unnecessarily dubious, under Mr. Cruick- 

 shank's circumstances (having been caught tripping by your- 

 self and others), if I enquire where those plantations were, also 

 their age and state previously to such ruinous application, 

 with such other circumstantial information as will enable me 

 and the public to come to something like a correct conclusion. 

 Bare assertions, where abundant proof is, or ought to be, at 

 hand, are, generally speaking, very suspicious, but more par* 



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