THE PINE TREE. 173 
more than one foot from the surface where the subsoil is 
hard and gravelly. These are discernible above ground, and 
each forms a rib to the height of several feet on the side of 
the trunk.” 
The soil in the best native forests is of very various quali- 
ties. The popular belief is that a poor soil yields the best 
pine timber, but the soil of the native forests does not gene- 
rally support this theory. 
The soil of the old forest of Glenmore is generally of a 
rich deep-brown earth, rather clayey than otherwise, and 
apparently adapted for any description of hardwood timber. 
In Rothiemurchus the soil is very changeable, and it affects 
the size, and not the quality, of the timber. On the opposite 
side of the Spey, in the parish of Duthil, better pine timber 
can nowhere be found than that produced on slopes composed 
of rich deep-brown clay. Abernethy furnishes the greatest 
variety of soil. Generally speaking, it is a hazelly gravel, and 
parts change from a dry sand to a deep black mould; on the 
whole it is, perhaps, the least fertile district of soil occupied 
by the forests of Strathspey ; yet uncultivated moorland has 
produced an ash-tree upwards of twenty feet in girth; and 
while traversing these woods, we were surprised to find a 
common alder, standing on low meadow ground, near Lurg, 
which measured upwards of fifteen feet im circumference, 
which is beyond the girth of any tree of this species of British 
growth hitherto recorded. From these illustrations of the 
resources of the soil in the native forests, we need hardly add, 
that it is at least equal to the soil on which the Scotch pine 
produces inferior timber throughout the country, and that 
the superiority of the native Highland pine ought by no 
means to be attributed to the timber being produced on poor 
soil. 
The trees in the native forests are in general older than 
most plantations throughout Scotland, and are of greater size, 
even in proportion to their age. Notwithstanding this, it is 
very uncommon to see a single tree in a decaying state. We 
observed several trunks that had a few feet of timber scooped 
