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walnut lumber in building a fine farm house, sawed from the trees he had helped to plant 

 when a boy." 



The late Horace G-reeley, in speaking of the available opportunity for timber culture 

 in West Chester County, remarked : — 



" I am confident that ten thousand acres might to-morrow be given back to fprest, 

 with profit to the owners and advantage to all its inhabitants. It is a fruit-growing, 

 milk-producing, truck-farming country, closely adjoining the greatest city of the New 

 World ; hence one wherein land can be cultivated as profitably as almost anywhere else. 

 Yet I am satisfied that half its value may be more advantageously devoted to timber 

 than to grass or tillage. Nay, I doubt that one acre in a hundred of rocky land — ^that is, 

 land ribbed or dotted with rocks that the bar or the rock-hook cannot lift from their beds, 

 and which will not, as yet, pay to blast — is now tilled to profit, or ever will be until it shall 

 be found advisable to clear them utterly of stone breaking through or rising within two feet 

 of its surface. The time will doubtless arrive in which many fields would pay for clearing 

 of stone, that would not to-day. These, I urge, should be given up to wood now, and 

 kept wooded until the hour shall have struck for ridding them of eveiy impediment to the 

 steady progress of both the surface and the subsoU plough. 



" Were all the rocky crests and rugged acclivities of our country bounteously wooded 

 once more, and kept so for a generation, our floods would be less injurious, our springs 

 unfailing, and our streams more constant and equable ; our blasts would be less bitter, 

 and our gales less destructive to fruit ; we should have vastly more birds to delight us 

 with their melody, and aid us in our not very successful war with devouring insects ; we 

 should grow peaches, cherries, and other delicate fruits, which the violent caprices of our 

 seasons, and the remorseless devastations of our visible and insect enemies, have all but 

 annihilated ; and we shall keep more cows and make more milk on two-thirds of the land 

 now devoted to grass than we actually do from the whole of it. And what is true of 

 West Chester is measurably true of every rural county in the Union." 



The advantages of wind-breaks are set forth by Judge C. E. Whiting, of Iowa, from 

 his own experience as follows : — 



" I have, in belts around my fields, varying from single to twenty rows of trees, 

 mostly planted 4,356 to the acre, about forty acres of timber. The trees in these belts 

 vary as to the time of planting ; some are eighteen years old and some only one year 

 planted ; the greater portion are, however, from five to twelve years of age. The needed 

 thinning of these belts furnishes all the wood that is wanted on the farm, including 

 stakes and rails to keep the fences in repair, posts for all repairs needed, and many for 

 new fences I annually build in extending my farm. When my walnuts get a little 

 larger I will have all I need and many for sale. There is not a stick of needed timber on 

 the farm, from a pea-brush, a grape-vine stake, or a binding-pole, up to a fair-sized saw- 

 log, that cannot be had from my groves, without cutting a single tree that does not need 

 thinning out from the groves. 



" About five miles of my timber-belts are so planted that I have commenced using 

 the standing trees for fence-posts. Where a light fence is not needed, with the use of 

 the barbed wire, and a little change in the staple, the use of these live posts is a perfect 

 success. Strongly and urgently as I have heretofore advocated the planting of thick 

 belts of timber round our fields, each year but confirms me in the opinions then 

 expressed. The land that remains will, year after year, produce larger and more certain 

 crops than the whole field would produce without such protection. I also repeat that, in 

 spite of all the learned discussions and scientific theorizing in regard to the cause of our 

 timberless prairies, our cultivated forest trees, year after year, grow right along with 

 immense rapidity, in blissful ignorance of all the reasons why they should not grow." 



Hon. J. Sterling Morton, of eastern Nebraska, lays down his rules, and mentions 

 his results, as follows — 



