12 PRACTICAL FOEESTEY. 



heavy loss from wind and shock when the sprouts are cut away, but 

 they should never be allowed to suppress the lower story of growth. 



Stored coppice is a very useful system where the principal demand 

 is for small material, like fuel, ties, and fencing, but where some 

 large timber also is required. It was developed chiefly by the 

 French, who use it with admirable results. 



Seed or high forest. — By far the most useful and important forests 

 are, as a rule, those which spring directly from seed, such as the pine 

 forests of the Southern States and the great hardwood forests of the 

 Mississippi Valley. Such forests are called seed forests. The seed- 

 forest systems are of many kinds, some of which are pecuUarly 

 adapted for the management of certain forests in the United States. 

 Just as the sprout-forest systems are chiefly useful to produce fuel, 

 posts, ties, and trees of small size, so the seed-forest systems are pro- 

 ducers of sawlogs and large timbers. 



Regular seed forest. — ^When a tract of woodland is destroyed by 

 fire in one of the Rocky Mountain States, it often happens that the 

 seeds of the lodgepole pine are scattered over it by the wind in pro- 

 digious numbers. The seeds germinate abundantly, seedlings spring 

 up, and in a very few years a young even-aged forest of lodgepole 

 pine covers the ground. As it grows older fires destroy patches of 

 it here and there, and in time every patch is covered again with a 

 younger generation of even age. After many years the forest which 

 sprang up after the first fire has become broken into a nimaber of 

 even-aged patches without uniformity in size or regular gradations 

 in age. 



Now let us suppose that this land was taken in hand by the Gov- 

 ernment when the lodgepole pine first came in, and that the lodgepole 

 reaches its maturity at 80 years. If the government forest ofiicers 

 had divided such a forest into eighty parts, and then had cut the 

 timber from one part each year, after a time they would have had 

 eighty divisions, each covered with even-aged forest, but differing 

 in age among themselves from' 1 to 80 years. Every year one part 

 would reach the age of 80 years and would be cut, and evidently the 

 other seventy-nine parts would always be stocked with trees from 1 

 to 79 years old. 



When the trees on one of the eighty divisions just mentioned 

 become ripe for the ax, provision must be made for a new crop. 

 This would be a very simple matter if the forest on that division 

 could be reproduced naturally in one year, but that is practically 

 impossible. Such rapid reproduction can be got only by planting, 

 which is chiefly useful in the United States for making new forests 

 and restoring injured forests, not for renewing old ones. Reproduc- 

 tion from the seed of the old trees is the only kind we need consider 



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