DECIDUOUS ORNAMENTAL TREES. 
249 
thousand two hundred feet. The total measurement of this 
lot of twenty-two trees, therefore, is two thousand six 
hundred and forty-five feet, which at the moderate value 
of two shillings per foot, would give the sum of £264, 10s. 
($1174) for twenty-two Larch trees, of something under 
eighty years old. We find by the Duke of Athol’s tables of 
measurement, that trees planted by him in 1743, were nine 
feet three inches in circumference, when measured at four 
feet from the ground, in 1795. 
The plantations of Larch made by Duke James of Athol, 
between 1733 and 1759, amounted to one thousand nine 
hundred and twenty-eight trees. Of these, eight hundred 
and seventy-three, were cut down between 1809 and 1816. 
The Duke of Athol had the satisfaction to behold a British 
frigate built in 1819 and 1820 at Woolwich yard, out of 
timber planted at Blair and Dunkeld, by himself and the 
Duke his predecessor. And the extensive and increasing 
Larch forests of those districts, may yet be called upon largely 
to supply both our naval and mercantile dock-yards. Mankind 
are prone to cherish and embalm the memory of individuals 
whose claims to notoriety have originated in their wide-spread 
destruction of the human race ; but they are too apt to forget 
those who have been the benefactors of mankind. That a 
vessel formed from trees of his introduction and planting, 
should have waved the British flag over the ocean, is likely 
to be all the reward contemporaneous or posthumous, which 
will ever adhere to the noble Duke, for the great good he has 
done to his country, and for the blessed legacy he has left to 
his descendants, by the plantation of about fifteen thousand 
five hundred and seventy-three English acres of ground, 
which consumed above twenty-seven millions, four hundred 
and thirty-one thousand, and six hundred trees. 
32 
