I. 1. THE WHITE PINE. 65 
southern parts of Maine it has much diminished, and the lum- 
ber has become of inferior quality. From the Penobscot and 
other great rivers in the northern parts of that State, the expor- 
tation is still immense; but the lumberers have to go every year 
to a greater distance from the great water-courses, and to ascend 
smaller streams and more remote lakes. The same thing is 
happening in New York; and the day is evidently not far 
distant, when the inhabitants of New England even, will have 
to depend on Canada for this wood, unless measures are taken 
to restore the pine forests on those millions of acres which are 
suitable for no other use, while they are admirably adapted to 
the production of various kinds of pine. 
The white pine is a treeof rapid growth. Where it has been 
cultivated, in England and France, it has been found to increase 
in height at the rate of from fifteen inches to three feet, each 
year, for fifty or sixty years. A tree near Paris, thirty years 
planted, is eighty feet high, with a diameter of three feet. By 
observing the annual stages of limbs, it may be seen, that in 
many parts of this State, it grows in height three or four feet a 
year, and sometimes more. In Dalton, I measured an old white 
pine, which was more than 100 feet high, and found its circum- 
ference at the ground twelve feet eight inches, and at three feet, 
ten feet nine inches. 
In 1809 or ’10 a belt of pines and other trees was planted on 
two sides of the Botanic Garden in Cambridge, to protect it 
from the northwest winds. In the winter of 1541 and ’2, when 
they had been growing thirty-one years, many of them were 
carefully measured by myself, with the assistance of the skilful 
and intelligent gardener, Mr. Carter. Ten of the white pines 
exhibited an average of twenty inches diameter at the ground, 
showing an annual growth of nearly two-thirds of an inch in 
diameter. The two largest measured five feet seven inches in 
circumference at the ground, and four feet eight inches at the 
height of three feet. The average diameter at three feet was 
sixteen inches and one-half, and at five feet, more than fifteen 
and one-half inches. Rev. J. L. Russell gives me an account of a 
white pine which grew in a rocky swamp in Hingham, which, 
at the age of thirty-two years, gave seven feet circumference 
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