Excerpt from A Paper on Forestry This very important fact should be kept in mind, viz., that thick young forests will grow more cords of wood, whether the wood be in lumber or in fuel trees, by being properly thinned than they will bv letting them go unthinned. The more you cut out in thinning, up to a certain point, the larger and more profitable will be your timber crop and the sooner fit to cut. The same is true of a wood crop. This has been demonstrated by repeated experiments. All farmers know that they may have their corn, potatoes, grain, or grass so thickly seeded that the crop will be small. It is the same with the timber crop. Either too many or too few stalks of corn or number of trees to the acre diminishes the quantity of the crop. But there is this very important differ ence to be observed in the growing ofa cr0p of corn and a crop of timber. In growing corn and other farm crops we start the crops with about the number of plants we expect to mature, while to grow a crop of good timber we should start with a great many more trees to the acre than we intend to grow to timber size. This picture (see Fig. I) shows the form of the pine, spruce or hemlock when grown in open land. The second picture (see Fig. 2) is of pines, which have grown from seed sown on poor plains, and they stand so close together that they are growing very slowly. They need to be thinned, and those selected to be grown into large trees should have their dry limbs removed. These trees have not green limbs enough instead of a surplus to be removed. The man who sowed the seed from which these pines, represented in the second picture, grew, died in 1883, and it is believed that he sowed their seed about 1870, and yet these pines, with the exception of those on the outside, average, far less than the size of common fence stakes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.