9 



and found thousands of acres in Plymouth and Barnstable 

 counties — once sandy plains — covered with fine forests. The 

 common pitch pine has there been most generally used for the 

 reclamation of sand barrens. Recently the Scotch pine has 

 been widely planted. The seeds were sometimes sowed broad- 

 cast, and sometimes dropped in furrows. The cost was trifling, 

 and the profit has been satisfactory. 



Hummel attributes the desolation of the Karst, the high 

 plateau lying north of Trieste — until recently one of the most 

 parched and barren districts in Europe — to the felling of its 

 woods, centuries ago, to build the navies of Venice. The 

 Austrian government is now making energetic, and thus far 

 successful efforts for the reclamation of this desolate waste, 

 having planted over half a million of young trees, and sown 

 great quantities of seed. In the vicinity of Antwerp less than 

 fifty years ago was a vast desolate plain. Looking to-day in 

 the same direction from the spire of the cathedral, one can 

 see nothing but a forest, whose limits seem lost in the horizon. 

 Forest plantations have transformed those barren lands into 

 fertile fields. French writers point with pride to an experi- 

 ment begun eighty years ago on the very crest of a peninsula 

 in Dauphiny, where stands a long stretch of fine forest, and 

 where it had been confidently affirmed trees could not be made 

 to grow. 



On the Adriatic, Baltic, Mediterranean, Biscayan, and other 

 coasts, the disastrous encroachments of tlie sea have been 

 checked by forest plantations. Extensive plains, once barren 

 sands south of Berlin, about Odessa and north of the Black 

 Sea and vast steppes in Russia, are now well wooded. 

 R. Douglass & Sons of Waukegan, Illinois, who have been 

 the pioneers in promoting economic tree planting in the West, 

 began four years ago the experiment of reclaiming barren sand 

 ridges near the shore of Lake Michigan, trying pitch pine, 

 white pine, Austrian pine, and Scotch pine. Here, as on 

 Cape Cod, the Scotch pine proved the best for reclaiming 

 sandy barrens. With these facts from abroad and at home it 

 cannot be denied that even the poorest soils in Connecticut 

 may be reclaimed. The Pinus maritima, which proved best 



