89 



as much to the cheap pine lumber a3 to the enterprise and intelligenee of 

 the people expended upon the prolific soil of the state. This cheap lumber 

 has built our houses and our barns, our stores and fences, and given to the 

 people their long stride in the race of nations. But while those trees have 

 been destroyed to build a state, no efforts are made to replace them 

 with others ; on the contrary, if the young trees are not broken down 

 and killed, the fire is allowed to run over the land and complete the devasta- 

 tion man had commenced ; whereas, if they had received proper care and 

 attention, the forests of evergreens now cut down and gone, would in 40 or 

 50 years have been replaced with another nearly equal to the first. 



If in planting belts and groves of trees for timber, shelter or protection 

 from winds, a free use were made of such evergreens as would thrive on the 

 soil occupied, they would grow all the better for admixture ; and within a 

 lifetime, the pines would become saw logs, and the cedars split into fence 

 posts. Retaining their foliage during winter, they afford protection at a 

 time when it is most needed. A belt of these surrounding a farm, mingled 

 with others, or alone, or at least such portions as contains the buildings, or- 

 chard and garden, gives a cheerful, comfortable appearance to the place; and 

 both man and beast will live longer and be moi'e comfortable and happy than 

 when exposed to every gale of winter, when for more than six months of the 

 year nothing appears life-like — nothing to break the force of the blast as it 

 comes over drifting snows. If they take room, and shade the ground, they 

 shelter while the live, and pay a large rent in timber when theyflie. Cher- 

 ish them as good friends. 



PINUS. {Pine FamUt/.) 



Fruit a cone formed of the imbricated and woody carpellary scales which 

 are thickened at the apex (except in the white pines,) persistent, spreading 

 when ripe and dry; the two nut-like seeds partly sunk in excavations at the 

 base of the scale, and in separating carrying away a part of the lining in the 

 form of a thin and fragile wing. Leaves evergreen, needle-shaped, in fasci- 

 cles of 2 to 5 from the same slender buds, sheathed by the scaroua bud-scales 

 at the base. Flowering in May and June ; the cones maturing the seeds in 

 the autumn of the second year. The name is classical latin. 



PINUS BANKSIANA. (Gray or Norilwm Scrub Fine) 

 Leaves are in pairs, short, oblique, divergent — cones ovate-conical, usually 

 curved, smooth, the scales pointless. This species is generally a stragling 

 shrub or low tree from five to twenty feet high, but on the almost barren 

 "Potsdam sands" of Wisconsin, it fills an important place, and grows into a 

 tree fitted for many uses. It seems to flourish best in soil too thin for grow- 

 ing any other tree, even the jack-jack-oak. In its early years it out-grows 

 all other evergreens, and has been said to make a tree five inches in diametre 

 in ten years from the seed, and at about four years of age to grow eight and 

 ten feet in one season. At such times the upright shoot is tender and brittle, 

 very jucy, and may be eaten, but is neither palatable nor nutrioious, and 



