CRUICKSHANK'S PllACTICAL PLANTER. 855 



with the roots of larger trees, and in the latter they 

 had the soil to themselves. Experience has proved, 

 that in exposed bleak situations, shelter is necessary 

 to young plants. Transplanted oaks among the 

 roots of young trees, so large as to afford sufficient 

 shelter, very frequently do not succeed, at least with- 

 out the utmost care in the transplanting, and a con- 

 siderable deal of labour to prevent the roots of the 

 shelter trees from starving the transplanted ones, 

 unless a very propitious moist summer follow the 

 transplanting. Raising from the seed, which ob- 

 viates all this, seems therefore the only convenient- 

 ly practicable way. Yet it must be owned, that 

 the system of raising forests in sihi from the seed, 

 appears, as yet, much more successfid on paper than 

 on om* hills and moors. 



In endeavouring to confute the opinion, that the 

 oak will not grow throughout Scotland, but in the 

 milder and more propitious situations, Mr Cruick- 

 shank adduces the well-known fact, that large oak 

 timber is found in almost every peat-moss. 



This is a fact worth tracing to its cause. Under 

 Nature's own conduct, trees advance considerably ftir- 

 ther into elevated or cold inhospitable regions, than 

 they would otherwise do, by means of the mutual 

 shelter, and of the more hardy kinds acting as an ad- 

 vance guard. Yet there is a limit to this, as the 



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