10 
THE EXPERIMENT OF AUGUSTUS PRATT, MEMBER OF THE 
MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 
Mr. Pratt, with eight days’ work, planted thirteen acres 
of poor land with white pine seed. The land was largely 
covered with blueberry bushes and small weeds. Forty years 
after the planting, he cut from forty to forty-five cords of box- 
board logs to the acre from that land, and sold the logs, deliv- 
ered at mill, for six dollars a cord. The wood brought quite 
a littlesum. A cord of boxboard logs is said to average about 
one thousand feet of five-eighths of an inch thick boxboards. 
A great many thousand acres of better land than this lie idle 
in New Hampshire. Why not put it to growing timber? 
What a neglect of opportunity to enrich both the owners and 
the state! Mr. Pratt is a member of the Massachusetts board 
of agriculture. 
OMAR PEASE. 
The Shakers of Enfield, Connecticut, possess hundreds of 
acres of poor sand plains, in some few places too poor to sod 
over. Omar Pease, the head of one of the families, conceived 
the idea of covering these plains with white pine. He collected 
the seed during the first days of September, and plowed the 
land and sowed it to rye, and harrowed in the rye. Then he 
sowed broadcast two quarts of white pine seed to the acre, and 
rolled the ground. This course he pursued for several years as 
he was able to procure the pine seed. The number of acres he 
seeded is unknown, as it has never been measured. Judging 
from looks and what I was told, I estimate he seeded nearly two 
hundred acres. I was surprised that on these dry sand plains 
he succeeded every year, but such appears to be the fact. 
Pease died in 1883, and his successor was unwise enough to 
plow up some forty acres of the youngest pines, then about a 
foot in height, for the purpose of growing rye. The rye failed 
to produce a paying crop and the ground has since lain waste. 
Whether Pease harvested any rye from that sown with his pine 
seed, I could not learn. Pease was, undoubtedly, an observing 
man, and had noticed that a hot sunshine directly upon the 
