Indian Forest Records . 
[Vol. VIII 
of 10*6 inches in 5J years. This would give a shoot of 5 feet 
in 31 years. It is, however, quite exceptional in these forests 
to find vigorous plants of this kind which have never died 
back and this rate of growth is almost certainly too fast for 
the average plant in the shade. It is possible to get an idea 
of the correctness or otherwise of this estimate by comparing 
the root-growth of the 5J-years old plants in Plot V with that 
of existing young plants in the forest which have already 
established themselves naturally. Twenty natural “ seed¬ 
lings ” dug at random, in January 1919, in the forest imme¬ 
diately adjacent to Plot V, which had a shoot 5 feet high, 
showed the average diameter of the base of the root to be 
1*6 inches (from 1*1 inches to 2-7 inches). The diameter of the 
base of the root of the 5J-years old plants in PlotV was remark¬ 
ably constant, viz. 0-2 inch, both of those plants which had 
never died back and also of those which had died back. 
Thus it apparently will take 44 years for these plants to 
attain a root-diameter of 1-6 inches and to produce a shoot 
5 feet high. We thus have 
(а) Years required for a 5 feet shoot in the shade calculated from the 
shoot growth of plants which have never died back . . . 31 
(б) Years required for a 5 feet shoot in the shade calculated from the root 
growth of plants which have died back ..... 44 
Average . 37-5 
Seeing that, in the shade, the great majority of the seedlings do 
die back (in the western half of Plot Y only 14 per cent, of the 
plants did not die back, and this too under unusually favour¬ 
able conditions), we are almost certainly on the safe side in 
adopting 40 years as the period necessary for the production 
of a shoot 5 feet high in the shade. This would give an 
average annual height-increment of 1-5 inches. 
(10) To determine the possibility of securing sal regeneration 
naturally under shade and the length of time required for 
this, it is obviously necessary to consider not only the rate 
of growth, which has been dealt with above, but also the 
time required to obtain a full stock of seedlings. 
It is believed that an area in the shade cannot be regarded as 
fully stocked unless there is at least 1 seedling, 10 inches high, 
[ 184 ] 
