Notes of a Tour in Switzerland. 5233 



which pervades them, interrupted only by the murmur of some distant 

 waterfall or torrent, or the occasional roar of an avalanche ; the 

 blasted trunks and limbs of the pines, and their dry, shrivelled 

 branches dangling with long beards of gray lichen ; the golden car- 

 pet of moss spread beneath, embroidered with the delicate fronds of 

 ferns; and, above all, the loftiness of the individual trees; — these and 

 the like are the component elements of their grandeur. I dare not 

 trust myself in an attempt to state precisely the height to which the 

 pine trees attain. M. Gaudin, under the head of Pinus Abies, justly 

 says, "arbor excelcissima, trunco longissimo, 1 ' the loftiest of trees, 

 with the longest trunk. Heretofore the thought had repeatedly 

 struck me, when looking at pictures and views of alpine scenery, that 

 the pine trees therein depicted were unnatural, exaggerated repre- 

 sentations, and portrayed as out of all proportion too tall, and espe- 

 cially as compared with their horizontal dimensions. But one lives 

 to learn ; and I now find that what I had presumed to criticise as 

 faulty are faithful delineations of nature and strictly accurate. Even 

 when standing singly, the Swiss pine does not seem disposed to 

 spread its branches to any very great extent horizontally, but shoots 

 up in a narrow cone, like the church steeple, which it often exceeds 

 in height. As nothing like artificial pruning, or weeding out of some 

 for the sake of the remainder, seems to be practised in the Swiss 

 forests, the trees are left to grow at random, just as Nature had scat- 

 tered the seed ; and so thick do they stand sometimes, and crowded 

 together, that it is still a marvel to me how they should attain the size 

 they often do, and not rather starve and choke each other. Certain 

 it is that, were our larch and fir plantations to be left without thin- 

 ning out from time to time, and allowed to stand so thick, the trees 

 would soon come to nothing, and would smother and kill one another 

 in less than fifteen or twenty years. 



They have a practice in Switzerland of sometimes felling the fir 

 trees, not, as is usual, at the very base of the trunk, but at two or 

 three or even five or six or more feet above the surface of the ground, 

 and consequently leaving a set of most unsightly stumps of the above 

 dimensions to rot on the ground at leisure. This should appear to 

 be a most wanton waste of just so many feet of the best of the timber. 

 Why the method should be adopted I have failed to ascertain, unless 

 it be (as I have heard it suggested in explanation) that the trees have 

 been felled during a deep snow, when it would be impossible to get 

 at the base of the tree near the surface, and so there was no help for 

 it; but, if such be the case, why not wait awhile, and defer the felling 



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