12 
In several European countries and in southern Asia, trees are 
grown as a crop, and of the kind and size desired. Just think 
of having every tree a valuable one and all of one kind and all 
fit to cut and every butt log perfectly clear, except knots not 
much larger than a pipestem, and these confined to within one 
and a half or two inches of the heart! Lumbermen have re- 
cently informed me that boards averaging from twelve to fifteen 
inches in diameter, from such butt logs, would in these days of 
cheap lumber sell for thirty dollars per thousand feet. 
Sow the seed or take proper care of your close-set little pines, 
and it will not be many years before there will be some thirty 
thousand feet of such butt logs to the acre, worth say twenty 
dollars per thousand on the stump, or six hundred dollars be- 
side all the other logs. Do not say that it cannot be done. 
It is entirely practical. Ask Vanderbilt, ask Bismarck, ask 
the Duke of Athol, ask Gladstone, ask any of the real estate 
owning nobility of England, ask any forester in Europe, 
ask the forest schools of the old world—all, all of these 
will assure you that it is one of the easiest things in the world 
to grow timber as a crop, and will be just as positive 
about it as you are that thirty bushels or more of corn can be 
grown on an acre of _New Hampshire land. What a 
contrast in lumbering such plantations, compared with break- 
ing an acre of deep snow in the mountains of northern New 
York to get three thousand feet of small, knotty spruce! Three 
thousand feet per acre is considered the average yield of timber 
per acre in the Adirondack region, by Superintendent Fox, and 
it brings one dollar and a half per thousand feet on the stump. 
Just think of the luxury of cutting a hundred thousand feet of 
first-class white pine, with every butt log clear, and the second 
logs nearly so, from an acre of our cheap lands instead of break- 
ing miles upon miles of roads over many acres of land to get 
that amount of far poorerlumber! Yet it is entirely practical to 
grow a hundred thousand feet of excellent white pine timber on 
an acre of land. Comparatively a few years since I knew a 
leading farmer to plow up a few improved strawberry plants 
which his son had set out in the garden. The idea that one 
should think of cultivating strawberries! They grow wild. 
