AMONG THE PINES AND FIRS 203 
properly managed, are a decidedly remunerative 
way of utilising the land, as they often yield 
extremely good returns on the capital invested in 
them. Indeed, wherever purely actuarial consid- 
erations may govern Forestry, the greatest profit 
for land below the average in quality, and not in- 
frequently also for some of the average classes 
of woodland soil, will usually be in coniferous 
crops treated with a rotation of about seventy or 
eighty years. And this will be all the more 
apparent if plantations of timber have first to be 
formed on vacant land in place of being merely 
regenerated from crops already growing on the 
ground. 
There are, of course, drawbacks even to the culti- 
vation of conifers, because they are more exposed 
to many serious kinds of damage than crops of 
broad-leaved trees. Grown in dense masses, pines 
and firs are liable to breakage by heavy snow, and 
to be thrown ex masse by strong gales, as in 1893 
—damages from which the deciduous larch suffers 
least of all the conifers. Then they have each their 
own particular scourges in the shape of noxious 
beetles and moths, and of fungous diseases, which 
effect a foothold wherever the crops are either 
