318 FUTAIE, OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM. 
from tlie roots to the utmost twigs, cannot be conceived to be 
unlimited in power, and it is probable that it differs in dif¬ 
ferent species, so that while it may suffice to raise the fluid to 
the height of five hundred feet in the sequoia, it may not be 
able to carry it beyond one hundred and fifty in the oak. The 
limit may be different, too, in different trees of the same spe¬ 
cies, not from defective organization in those of inferior 
growth, but from more or less favorable conditions of soil, 
nourishment, and exposure. Whenever a tree attains to the 
limit beyond which its circulating fluids cannot rise, we may 
suppose that decay begins, and death follows, from the same 
causes which bring about the same results in animals of lim¬ 
ited size—such, for example, as the interruption of functions 
essential to life, in consequence of the clogging up of ducts by 
matter assimilable in the stage of growth, but no longer so 
when increment has ceased. 
In the natural woods, we observe that, though, among the 
myriads of trees which grow upon a square mile, there are 
several vegetable giants, yet the great majority of them begin 
to decay long before they have attained their maximum of 
stature, and this seems to be still more emphatically true of 
the artificial forest. In France, according to Clave, “ oaks, in 
a suitable soil, may stand, without exhibiting any sign of 
decay, for two or three hundred years; the pines hardly ex¬ 
ceed one hundred and twenty, and the soft or white woods 
[hois llanos ], in wet soils, languish and die before reaching the 
fiftieth year.” * These ages are certainly below the average of 
those of American forest trees, and are greatly exceeded in 
very numerous well-attested instances of isolated trees in 
Europe. 
The former mode of treating the futaie, called the garden 
system, was to cut the trees individually as they arrived at 
maturity, but, in the best regulated forests, this practice has 
been abandoned for the German method, which embraces not 
only the securing of the largest immediate profit, but the re- 
* Etudes Forestttres, p. 89. 
