THE planter's GUIDE. 



57 



mutilating the tops and side branches of trees, and still 

 more the decapitating of them, is utterly destructive of 

 theu' health and growth ; and that, whatever other 

 advantages might be supposed to attend the art, that 

 alone is sufficient to neutralise or counterbalance them. 

 It was this weighty objection, brought forward by Miller, 

 that first led me to bestow particular attention on the 

 subject, and to seek for some general theory or principle 

 which, if founded on the laws of nature, as affecting woody 

 plants under difi^erent circumstances of climate and soil, 

 might serve to regulate and improve the practice. 



But independently of all partial faults that might be 

 found with transplanting, as now generally practised, 

 Miller objects to all transplantation whatever, whether of 

 young trees or old. Every tree, he holds, in order to 

 reach the greatest size and perfection of which it is sus- 

 ceptible, should be raised at once from the seed : to 

 remove it at all is sensibly to deteriorate it. Therefore 

 it follows, that if by removal, when young, it suffer injury, 

 it must by the same process, when old, suffer much greater 

 injury. On this opinion of the expediency of sowing the 

 seeds of trees, instead of transferring plants from the 

 seed-bed to the nursery, and thence to the open planta- 

 tion, he is not singular, as the doctrine has been sup- 

 ported, both before and since his time, by very eminent 

 phytologists : while others, of no small weight and name, 

 have as strenuously taken up the adverse side of the ques- 

 tion, and maintained, that plants may not only be safely 

 transferred from the seed-bed to the nursery, before being 

 planted out, but that woods raised with such materials 

 possess advantages which those at once springing from 

 the seed can never possess.'''' These different systems. 



* Note I. 



