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NOTICES OF AUTHORS. 



planted, would contain 600 trees, value 10s. each, 

 differs considerably from what has come within our 

 experience. The timber of an acre of Scotch fir, 

 sixty years planted in such waste ground as occurs 

 in the valley of the Tay, will not average much more 

 than one hundred pounds per acre on the spot, and 

 laid down on the quay at Newcastle (the place to 

 which the greater part of the Scotch fir on the east 

 of Scotland is carried), would not produce L. 300 

 per acre. 



In order the more to encourage planting, Mr 

 Cruickshank runs into a speculative statement of the 

 fertilizing influence of planting upon the soil, in ra- 

 ther a novel manner, leaving out the particular facts, 

 which, he says, had come under his own observation, 

 and adducing one as proof, furnished to him by 

 another person unnamed. We have often had occa- 

 sion to see ground, which had produced a crop of firs, 

 brought under tillage without any marked fertility 

 beyond the adjacent fields which had been under pro- 

 per rotation of cropping, certainly inferior to what had 

 lain for the same length of time in natural grass pas- 

 ture. There is a particular instance in a slight ris- 

 ing ground (diluvial soil) in the Carse of Gowrie, 

 where the fields, since the rooting out of the fir-wood, 

 have not paid seed and labour in corn, though un- 



