376 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE. 



spruce, and by the processes of natural selection the weak qualities ot 

 other evergreen trees have apparently been eliminated from it; it has 

 survived and persisted by reason of its unusual powers of endurance, 

 its toughness, and insensibility to the rigors of a northern and subarctic 

 climate. It has, however, of late years, and perhaps periodically, been 

 the special prey of boring insects, species which also attack its allies 

 and the pines, but which seem in regions from which the pine has been 

 eliminated by the ax of the lumberman to concentrate their forces on 

 this tree. 



THE DESTRUCTION OF SPRUCES IN NORTHERN MAINE. 



Passing into Aroostook CourTty by railroad by way of New Bruns 

 wick, we learned that the spruces were still dying in portions of that 

 Province in great numbers. For example, we were told that Mr. Gibson, 

 of Fredericton, in the winter of 18S2-'83 sent parties up the ]^asbwaka 

 Piver, a branch of the Saint John, with the expectation of cutting 

 40,000,000 feet of spruce lumber 5 but half of it was found to be dead.. 

 An examination of the spruces in the vicinity of Presque Isle, Ashland, 

 and Patten showed that the bud- worm had not been at work in those 

 parts of Aroostook, nor along the road from Patten to Mattawamkeag. 



In townships 8 and 9 (range 7 or 8?), on the headwaters of the Saint 

 Croix and Mattawamkeag, I was informed by a lumberman of unusual 

 powers of close observation that the spruce trees had only been affected 

 during the past five years. When he first went iuto the woods he 

 found the trees dying, and then advised the owners to fell them ; this 

 was the best possible advice, but it was not taken. He said the trees 

 would make good lumber for the second year after they showed signs 

 of dying, as it takes two years for them to become wholly dead. He 

 estimated that over the region he lumbered in about one in eight trees 

 had died ; in some localities two-thirds had been killed. He was the 

 only lumberman we have met who unhesitatingly attributed the disease 

 to borers, though we have been told by heavy owners of lumbering 

 regions that the borers were the cause ot the disease. This man re- 

 peatedly removed the bark, and, as he said, "found it full of little white 

 worms." He also assured me that he found similar worms in living 

 spruce trees, and that the result of their work was to girdle the tree. 



From conversations with different lumbermen it appears that a spruce 

 tree a foot in diameter gets its growth in from forty to fifty years. The 

 larger trees can be culled out of the same lumbering region every ten 

 years. Lumbermen have the impression that a spruce tree grows rap- 

 idly. This of course depends on the soil, position, and climate. We 

 have found the past season that spruce saplings about 4 feet high get 

 their growth in three years; it is easy to ascertain this by the difference 

 in the color and appearance of the bark. Whether the spruce grows more 

 rapidly than hard-wood trees remains to be ascertained. Standing in a 

 yard of a house in Maine, a sugar-maple, which has been a rapid grower, 

 and which we know to be about forty-eight years old, measured, in 

 September, 18S4, 1 foot from the ground, 2 feet § of an inch in diameter. 

 The Thorndike oak, on the campus of Bowdoin College, raised from an 

 acorn planted on the first commencement day of the college, on the first 

 Wednesday of September, 1806, now measures, at 1 foot from the ground, 

 30 inches in diameter, having therefore attained its present dimensions 

 in seventy-eight years. 



From Mattawamkeag we went to Moosehead Lake. Throughout the 

 great range of forests to be seen from the lake at and south of Mount 

 Kineo no dead spruces were to be observed ; though a single bud- worm 



