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 by 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 cr0p. Either too many or too few stalks of corn or number of trees to the acre diminishes the quantity of the cr0p. But there is this very important differ ence to be observed in the growing of a crop 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 cr0p 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 I883, and it is believed that he sowed their seed about I87o, and yet these pines, with the exception of those on the outside, average far less than the size of common fence stakes.

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