70 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
tions of wet and dry. For the same reason, it is selected for 
pumps, particularly ships’ pumps, and also for aqueduct pipes, 
for which purposes pieces are chosen with little heart-wood. It 
is also an excellent material for the sills of houses and barns, 
and for the sleepers of rail-roads and the stringers of bridges, 
and for the frame of mills, and other structures in damp situa- 
tions. It has also been made into staves for nail-casks. It is 
preferred to any other wood in the Northern States as fuel for 
steam-engines, and vast quantities of it are also consumed for 
the supply of families. Formerly, tar and lampblack were 
obtained from it. Now, from its increased value and scarcity, 
this use is rarely made of it. 
As the pitch pine grows commonly on the most barren sands, 
its growth is not rapid. On sandy plains, too poor for profit- 
able cultivation, and where only a single scanty crop of winter 
rye could be raised, far too small to repay the labor employed 
in its cultivation, I have observed the pitch pines gradually 
encroaching on the deserted fields, and making an average of 
twelve or fifteen feet in height in ten years. From the ex- 
amination of hundreds of trees which have been felled and split, 
on the same kind of land, and which were generally sixty or 
seventy years old, it appeared, that for the first sixteen to 
twenty-five years, the trees had increased in diameter at the 
rate of from two-ninths to two-fifths of an inch a year. After 
the twenty-fifth, the circles of growth were uniformly narrower, 
there being rarely so few as ten to an inch, and often twelve or 
thirteen. It would thus appear, that on the very poorest land, 
this tree, when self-planted, increases at the rate of an inch in 
diameter in three or four years, for the first twenty-five years, 
and after that at the rate of one in five or six. In between fifty 
and sixty years, then, worthless barren sands may be covered 
with pines of a foot in diameter and forty or fifty feet high. 
My friend, the Rev. J. L. Russell, lately of Chelmsford, has 
given me some very valuable facts upon this point. He says, 
in a letter dated December, 1839, “ Twenty years ago, in sow- 
ing a sandy plain with rye, it was necessary to tear up a great 
many young pitch pines. This was near the middle of May. 
The young trees, averaging three feet in height, were thrown 
