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Just as absurd do many to-day deem the growing of timber as 
a crop as did that man of growing strawberries. Timber grows 
wild, they think, and so must grow! But cultivated strawber- 
ries so supply the market now that probably multitudes have 
no idea that they ever grew wild. This will be the case to a 
great extent with timber. It will be grown and harvested as a 
crop, and land will be seeded to timber trees as it is now seeded 
to grass or planted to corn. 
There appear to be about three million acres of forest land 
in this state, and the annual cut of timber is believed to be about 
one hundred feet of boards per acre on an average, and the gen- 
eral belief is that at this rate of cutting, our timber supply will 
soon be exhausted. But when these three million acres shall be 
covered with properly cared for timber trees there may be from 
five to seven times this amount cut yearly and the supply be as 
lasting as the sunshine and rainfall. 
With all the time since the flood to operate in, unassisted 
nature in our White Mountain region shows a crop of about 
five thousand feet of spruce on the average to the acre. As I 
have before stated, Mr. Carey finds by cutting trees and count- 
ing grains, it takes unassisted nature about one hundred years 
to start a spruce in the old forests, and grow it to six inches in 
diameter at four feet from the ground. We think no observant 
woodsman will doubt but that starting spruces in cleared land, 
pretty close together, and properly thinning them from time to 
time as they begin to crowd one another, one could grow these 
trees at least eighteen inches in diameter in the time that unas- 
sisted nature is growing them six inches in diameter, and a log 
eighteen inches in diameter, it will be remembered, is nine times 
as large as one six inches in diameter. Of course, the eighteen 
inch tree would have much more than nine times as much lum- 
ber in it, because it is so much taller. When the spruce whose 
yearly rings are shown in one of the illustrations in this paper 
was given space to grow in by having the forest thinned, it 
grew in diameter at the rate of four inches in eleven years, and 
at this rate of growth a spruce one hundred years old would be 
three feet in diameter. At this rate the butt-log would be 
thirty-six times as large as the six inch log. If the trees were 
