There is an immense amount of practical knowledge yet to be evolved before forestry culture can be made a great success in our country; but the rapidity with which Americans learn when they set themselves seriously about learning, will enable them to plant and manage forests with tolerable success whenever forest planting shall become an everyday business. Even in the old world, where they have had ages of inducement in forestry planting, they still find they have neglected to work out many valuable problems. For instance, the French arboricultural journals are now discussing whether it is best to set out one year old plants when a forest is to be founded, or whether it would be better to take plants several years old. Now at first thought, the usual forestry essay writer for the newspaper would say at once, take the young seedlings, by all means. They are cheaper; they take less handling; they are planted more rapidly; they are more certain to grow; and they recover from the check of transplanting in a much shorter time than larger trees. But on the other side are some considerations seldom thought of.

In the case of small trees, many more are planted than are necessary to form a permanent forest, because young trees need the protection of one another against wind and weather in infancy, and there has to be the labor of thinning after the young trees have grown. Then it is found best - nay, almost essential to profitable forestry - that the forest of young trees to grow rapidly into profit, must be as well cultivated as crops of corn, and thus we have four or five years of hard work in the case of the seedling plant. Now plants for a forest of a thousand acres, sown thinly in a nursery plot, may be grown on a half acre for five years at a comparatively low cost. They need not die in transplanting more than one year old, if the planter understands his business, and there need not be more than one year's difference in the result of check to growth from the larger size. There is no doubt but in these five-year old seedlings there would be four years gained in interest on ground and labor expenses, with no necessity for the cost of labor in thinning as in the other case, as they could be set just where they are to remain.

As we have said, it is an unsettled question in Europe, and they are doing there just what we are often apt to do, writing about it with hours on hours of labor on each other's opinions, but so far as we see, no one attempting to solve the matter by figures. It really looks as if the larger tree notion might carry the day if the two plans were fairly tried side by side with each other.

But the whole matter shows how much there is to learn before forestry planting will yield all the rapid profit it is capable of doing.