322 
REMOVAL OF LEAVES. 
It is often necessary to take measures for the protection of 
young trees against the rabbit, the mole, and other rodent 
quadrupeds, and of older ones against the damage done by the 
larvae of insects hatched upon the surface or in the tissues ot 
the bark, or even in the wood itself. The much greater lia¬ 
bility of the artificial than of the natural forest to injury from 
this cause is perhaps the only point in which the superiority 
of the former to the latter is not as marked as that of any 
domesticated vegetable to its wild representative. But the 
better quality of the wood and the much more rapid growth 
of the trained and regulated forest are abundant compensa¬ 
tions for the loss thus occasioned, and the progress of entomo¬ 
logical science will, perhaps, suggest new methods of prevent¬ 
ing the ravages of insects. Thus far, however, the collection 
and destruction of the eggs, by simple but expensive means, 
has proved the only effectual remedy.* 
It is common in Europe to permit the removal of the fallen 
leaves and fragments of bark and branches with which the 
forest soil is covered, and sometimes the cutting of the lower 
* I have remarked elsewhere that most insects which deposit and hatch 
their eggs in the wood of the natural forest confine themselves to dead 
trees. Not only is this the fact, hut it is also true that many of the borers 
attack only freshly cut timber. Their season of labor is a short one, and 
unless the tree is cut during this period, it is safe from them. In summer 
you may hear them plying their augers in the wood of a young pine with 
soft green bark, as you sit upon its trunk, within a "week after it has been 
felled, but the windfalls of the winter lie uninjured by the worm and even 
undecayed for centuries. In the pine woods of New England, after the 
regular lumberman has removed the standing trees, these old trunks are 
hauled out from the mosses and leaves which half cover them, and often 
furnish excellent timber. The slow decay of such timber in the woods, it 
may be remarked, furnishes another proof of the uniformity of temper¬ 
ature and humidity in the forest, for the trunk of a tree lying on grass or 
plough land, and of course exposed to all the alternations of climate, hardly 
resists complete decomposition for a generation. The forests of Europe 
exhibit similar facts. Wessely, in a description of the primitive wmod of 
Neuwald in Lower Austria, says that the windfalls required from 150 to 
200 years for entire decay .—Die OesterreicMschen Alpenlander und Hire 
Forste, p. 312. 
