152 REPORT OF THE FOREST, FISH AND GAME COMMISSION. 



poles selling for various prices, according to their size and form. As the crowns 

 of the trees soon close again, subsequent thinnings are necessary about every ten 

 or fifteen years, the better sticks being taken for building purposes while the rest go 

 mostly for pulp-wood if spruce, for firewood if pine, all sorts increasing in price 

 with the quality. Building material laid at the roadside brings about nine cents 

 per cubic foot; good spruce fuel wood about three dollars a cord. 



On the poor, sandy soil of Mecklenburg a thinning in Scotch pine, when the 

 trees are twenty years old, yields about two dollars per acre; when forty, five 

 dollars; when sixty, ten dollars; when eighty, twenty dollars; when one hundred, 

 thirty dollars. The total wood from thinnings gives about one hundred and thirty 

 dollars per acre. On good soil in the Erz mountains, Saxony, a thinning in 

 spruce, when the trees are twenty years old, yields four dollars per acre; when 

 forty, fifteen dollars; when sixty, eighty dollars. The total wood from thinnings 

 yields about two hundred dollars per acre. The thinnings largely offset the cost 

 and interest on the plantation up to the time of the final cutting. 



The final cutting is not often made before the trees reach the age of eighty 

 years. Sometimes they remain until they are one hundred and twenty years old, 

 especially where the soil is poor or the climate severe. These are the finest trees 

 in the forest, the diseased, deformed or injured ones having been removed in the 

 successive thinnings. Then about one hundred and sixty to two hundred straight, 

 cylindrical trees, twelve to fifteen inches in diameter and about eighty feet high, 

 with shafts free of branches, stand on an acre, offering in all about 40,000 to 50,000 

 feet of lumber and selling on the stump for from $500 to $600. These are felled 

 and taken from the woods in almost full tree lengths. It is common in Europe 

 to see logs sixty feet long being hauled from the forest. 



In Germany the forest is managed largely in compartments, each of which, when 

 the mature trees are considered ready for removal, is cut clean and planted 

 with the new crop. Sometimes the compartments are located so that the cutting 

 proceeds regularly in a certain direction, usually from east to west as a protection 

 against the prevailing winds, the cuttings being made at intervals of perhaps ten 

 years, in which case the forest shows distinctly ten or twelve age classes arranged 

 in a series of progressive heights. If a compartment is harvested and restocked 

 each year, the number of age classes will, of course, equal the age to which the 

 trees are allowed to grow. This method of cutting clean and planting is the one 

 most commonly in use in the pine and spruce forests of Germany. 



Instead of planting the field with young trees, it is occasionally restocked by 

 sowing seed in spots hacked in the soil, the spots spaced about four feet apart. 

 Scotch pine seems to do quite well planted in this way, especially where the soil 



