Ixxx 



JiOYAL llOKTlCULTUUAL SOCIETY. 



It still, however, remains an article of faith in a modified de- 

 gree ; and I think it might be of real service to the community if 

 this Committee were to express an opinion upon it, or direct some 

 experiments to be made with the view of settling it by actual 

 trial. 



I think the point which the foresters' minds have reached on the 

 subject is this. They have given up the absurd notion they had 

 of pruning the trees with the view of preserving a balance be- 

 tween the roots and the branches ; but they adhere to the idea 

 that pruning is of importance to prevent the tree growing to 

 branch instead of growing to stem. And they have an idea that 

 pruning of this kind is to be done by rubbing off the young buds, 

 and nature is so to be kept in order by their precautions. 



My opinion is that all pruning is wrong, except as a surgical 

 operation. Where in the human species the knife would be used, 

 as in cancer, or squint, or deformity, or distortion, I would allow 

 the knife also to be used on forest-trees, but never otherwise ; and 

 the idea of a man roaming through a plantation and rubbing oft' 

 young buds, with the intention of preventing erroneous growth in 

 the branches which j in his mind's eye, he may see growing years 

 afterwards from these buds, is, to my mind, too highly absurd to 

 deserve serious answer. 



The real point on which the forester requires to be enlightened 

 is the growth of straight timber ; and I think there is something 

 still to be learned by ourselves (I mean the theoretical world) re- 

 garding it. He wants all the woody fibre deposited in a long 

 straight pole without any branches. JN"ow I believe that the 

 cause which produces a long straight pole is a preponderance of 

 root-fibre over leaves. The experiments of Mr. Herbert Spencer, 

 published in I860, in the Linnean Society's Transactions, effectu- 

 ally dispelled the old notion that the sap went up one set of tubes 

 and descended by another. It rises and falls in the same tubes, 

 which, in the normal state of things, each terminate in a mouth in 

 the root-fibrils, and in a mouth or mouths in the leaves ; and the 

 timber is deposited between and around the tubes by the sap 

 oozing through their walls in its passage up and down; the 

 mouths in the leaves act as suckers to draw up the sap when it is 

 flowing upwards. Now if there were 100 mouths above, dispersed 

 in branches all around the tree, and 100 mouths below, there 

 would be just 100 tubes, and the timber would be deposited in the 

 branches wherever they were ; but if we cut off fifty of the leaf- 



