Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/242

232 gentlemen who have concerns in our American settlements, to promote the culture of such plants and shrubs and trees, especially timber, as may yet add to those we find already agreeable to our climate.&quot; We all know with what patience, pains, and expense, the modern nations of Europe have searched the most distant climes for valuable vegetable productions.

We have noticed the astonishing exuberance with which our naturalized vegetation appears to flourish. It is a fact that ought to be regarded, and we may perhaps deduce from it an important lesson. It seems to point to a change of seed, to show that new seeds and a fresh soil are important conditions in vegetable economy. Perhaps we ought to take the hint from nature, and look beyond the old forest stocks of the neighborhood for timber-trees of a rapid and vigorous growth. I would not disparage the goodly race of trees that once adorned the county of Essex. I fear that we shall never look upon their like again. But it is doubtful whether they would take to the soil in the form of artificial plantations as kindly as some varieties brought from a distance. Every one knows that a new orchard cannot be raised on the site of an old one; and it is equally well known, that, when a forest of hard-wood trees is cut down, there the pines and softer woods succeed a spontaneous growth. The locust is here attacked by an insect, and is fast declining in our neighborhood, and I believe all along the Atlantic shore; while it is now appearing in its pristine vigor, a naturalized tree, in all the South of France. Michaux says that it is likely to become abundant in Europe, where it is a stranger, and scarce in America, its native clime.

A rotation of crops is as needful for forest-trees as for the more humble agricultural productions.

Where are the forests of Lebanon, into which Solomon sent his fourscore thousand hewers of wood? Dwindled at last to some half a dozen cedars, as if the earth was tired of producing, for so long a period, the same race of plants.

The larch plantations of Scotland are a striking example of the importance of a change of seed.

In the year 1738, a Scottish gentleman was seen wending