THE planter's guide. 



153 



unfaYonrable according to their own peculiar character. 

 The first question that is asked by a skilful planter, on 

 surveying a place for the first time, is not respecting the 

 soil, but the subsoil. If that be propitious, he is com- 

 paratively indifferent as to the superincumbent strata. 

 All soils are susceptible of melioration, from the most 

 silicious to the most argillaceous. Their pernicious 

 ingredients can often be modified, if they cannot be altered, 

 as we have already seen ; but subsoils are the gift of 

 nature, for evil or for good, and always lie beyond the 

 reach of our improvement. In order that the reader may 

 form a right judgment of both their favourable and un- 

 favourable properties, for the growth of wood, the follow- 

 ing short view is subjoined of the merits of both. 



The most favourable subsoils are those through which 

 the excess of water received in rainy seasons is allowed 

 slowly to percolate, and which retain moisture sufficient 

 for the sustenance of plants. First, close-lying strata ; in 

 which a considerable proportion of sand and fine gravel is 

 intimately mixed. Secondly, free-stone ; provided a bed 

 of hard and impermeable clay do not intervene between 

 it and the soil, which sometimes happens. And thirdly, 

 a kind of greenstone (Scottic^, rotten whin,) which is the 

 most favourable of all, when there is over it a sufficient 

 depth of mould, for the above purposes. Such, for example, 

 are the soil and subsoil of that favourite tract of country 

 at the foot of the Ochill and other hills in Stirlingshire 

 and Perthshire, so well known for the growth of its timber. 

 Here it descends in a gradual slope, from the hills towards 

 the river Forth, both east and west of the town of Stirling, 

 while the river slowly winds through the rich, but alluvial 

 plain below. In this sort of subsoil the excess of the 

 water collected from the sky and the heights above passes 

 through the fissures, and is received and retained in its 



