PRACTICAL ARBORICULTURE 69 
almost every species of wood in the Northern states, the quantity of cellulose 
and economy of preparing it from the wood, governing the manufacturers in 
the selection of the timbers. 
In places it is the custom to clear everything in cutting wood for pulp, 
even cutting spruce saplings only two to four inches in diameter. In doing 
this the land owners are fast destroying their forests and will regret the 
improvidence when it is too late. 
The spruce is slow to mature in a thick forest. From the seed to a tree 
three or four inches in diameter takes, under such conditions, a quarter of a 
century. But after becoming established in the ground, with strong root 
system, the trees increase in size quite rapidly, providing they have space to 
grow bencath the surface. Hence a proper management would be to thin 
these dense thickets by cutting out everything not desired for permanent 
stand, and these should be not closer than eight or ten feet, and much farther 
apart for lumber purposes. 
When it is considered that paper manufacturers are on the alert for some 
vegetable materials from which to make paper, and which shall be more 
economical than forest products, and that successful experiments have been 
madc with corn stalks, of which millions of tons go to waste annually, and 
with the straw from the rice fields of Texas, Louisiana and the Carolinas, and 
with hemp, and cottonseed hulls, millet and other substances which are now 
at least partially waste products, it should set the Maine people to thinking 
that by their improvidence they may, ere long, drive the paper industry from 
Maine and the east, to the Iowa and Indiana corn fields or the Texas rice 
plantations. 
Certain it is that paper can be made from many substances besides wood, 
for cellulose exists in very many vegetable growths which are abundant in 
the United States. 
The best advice which can now be given the owners of timber land, who 
are using it for making pulp, is, to spare the young spruce and fir, but to thin 
them severely in order that the individual trees may increase in size, which 
they cannot do in such crowded condition. 
There is no one fact in arboriculture which demands such constant and oft 
repeated admonition as, that for economy of time, largest income for money 
invested, and truest principles of forest management, all trees must have ample 
room for root extension; and no advantage gained by elimination of lower branches 
through overcrowding, can compensate for the enormous loss of time required for 
its accomplishment. 
The ax, saw and chisel must be used to remove superfluous branches. A 
dollar expended in labor in performing this operation saves twenty-five years 
of time, the interest on an investment for a quarter of a century, and the dis- 
couragement which everyone feels in holding forest property which yields so 
slight an income. 
In proof of this assertion, it is a well known fact that millions of spruce 
saplings two or three inches in diameter, show by their circles of growth 
that they are twenty-five years old, and trees a dozen inches across the 
stump have stood for three hundred years, while in every city in this land are 
