5 
mould and shape the tree, when it is growing, as easily as the 
potter moulds the clay! Just as though he cannot dictate to 
his lands whether they shall grow the worthless or the valua- 
ble trees, just the same as he can dictate to them whether they 
shall grow weeds or grain! 
To illustrate, if you have forty young white pines growing at 
equal distances from each other on an acre of land, you will 
grow forty wide-spreading limby and nearly worthless trees. 
If you have ten thousand young pines of the same age on an 
acre and let them all remain, you wait nearly a century to get 
trees of the proper size for fence poles. Careful measurements 
and counting of annual rings, by Austin Carey, Esq., show 
that the spruces, six inches in diameter, four feet from the 
ground, in our old forests average about one hundred years 
of age. If you judiciously thin the acre of thick pines from 
time to time, you will by the time they are from fifty to 
seventy-five years of age have the trees average from three 
hundred feet to five, six, or even seven hundred feet of inch- 
boards. And if you carefully prune off the limbs as fast as 
they die, and in some instances a little faster, your butt logs 
will be entirely free from knots, except very small ones very 
near the heart. Ifyou do not prune young trees even the butt 
logs will generally be pretty full of black knots, which all know 
greatly diminish the price and the value of lumber for many 
purposes. I find white pine boards in our village, selling 
from eight dollars for a thousand feet of inch-boards to sixty 
dollars per thousand feet. There is no reason why you cannot at 
an expense of about one and a half cents to a tree, prune young 
trees which you select to let stand for saw-logs, so that the 
butt-logs will make perfectly clear stuff to within two inches 
or less of the heart. I have known dead pine limbs, not much 
larger than a pipe stem, to remain on a tree some fifty years, 
causing a black knot in all the boards on that side of the tree, 
to near the heart. 
White pine limbs reach to the heart of the tree, as they start 
at top of the tree from buds, and as long as the limbs are 
alive they make red and fast knots, but when the limbs die 
the body of the tree grows yearly out over the dead, black 
