1 6 Soils and Larch. 



reason. It is supposed to be catholic in its 

 tastes, but it is not so. The forester, as a 

 rule, has to plant areas unfitted for ordinary 

 purposes of cultivation and unprepared by 

 husbandry, soils with little or no available 

 organic matter, and failure is not to be wondered 

 at, but success should often be looked upon 

 with some surprise. Take the poor thin 

 soils of the chalk or the dry sands of the 

 Lower Greensand, or the Bagshot sands, 

 and such like, where we find large areas of 

 larch struggling against disease and coming 

 to a premature maturity. It is on such soils 

 as these that we find the canker. 



Then take the bog-land of Ireland, where 

 we find the Scotch pine, the silver fir, and the 

 spruce outstrip the larch, the latter becoming 

 at an early age a prey to the worst form of 

 the disease, and where the ground is a little 

 drier but low-lying they struggle into age but 

 yield a dry and valueless timber. I could 

 point to plantations on a low-lying tract in 

 Ireland, perhaps twenty years old, where 

 every tree is cankered ; and to plantations 

 on the thin soils of the chalk where it is 



