THE NEW FORESTRY. 45 



in which the nurses have become the permanent and better 

 crop, with here and there a hard-wood to denote the original 

 purpose of the planter. We do not recommend nurses at all, 

 but, instead, the planting, sufficiently thick, of the permanent 

 crop, so as to establish overhead canopy as soon as possible. 



Such are some of the cultural practices advocated by those 

 who have hitherto been followed in this country, and the 

 adoption of which has caused so much loss. More might be 

 added, such as the absence of working plans, unprofitable 

 methods of labour, methods of planting, the extent ,to which 

 pruning, due to over-thinning, was carried, and extravagance 

 in the general management of woods before the period of 

 agricultural depression set in, that has paralysed forestry 

 operations on many estates ; but these will be dealt with in 

 other chapters. 



But although the majority of writers on forestry have 

 apparently belonged to Brown's school, there were, previous to 

 Brown's time, observers who had other and more correct 

 notions of the subject of timber production, evidently, as now, 

 derived from Continental sources, although the cultural process 

 was not thoroughly understood. According to " Ree's 

 Cyclopaedia," 1819, Mr. Salmon, of Woburn, in Bedfordshire, 

 writing in the " Transactions of the Society of Arts " on raising 

 good timber, says, " it may be a fair question if our country 

 be not capable of producing fir timber little or not at all 

 inferior to foreign fir." Considering the purposes to which 

 such timber is commonly applied, " it must occur," he writes, 

 " that clearness of knots, straightness, length and equality of 

 size of trunk, constitute its perfection, and that, if deficient 

 of all these, it is of no value but for firewood." His method 

 of producing trees of this kind was the wrong one — the 

 pruning knife ; but his object was to secure the same ends as 

 the Continental forester aims at in crowding, viz., the removal 

 of the lower branches. Mr. Salmon began cutting the lower 

 branches off when the trees were five or six years old, and kept 

 on at it every few years till the stem of the tree was clear up 

 to a height of forty feet or thereabout, after which such 

 " side lopping " was left to nature. 



SECTION II. — THE NEW FORESTRY. 



This is, really Nature's system, and is practically the system 

 reduced to method and adopted on the Continent. There is 

 nothing novel about it, nor, as far as we- are aware, has it ever 



