PRODIGIES OF GROWTH.
' I have been looking at slices of tree▪ s felled in different
parts of the world. The section that most filled the eye was cut from a Pinus insignis. We have many fine specimens in England, especially in the Isle of Wight ; but this came from near. Rotorua, in the North Island of New Zealand. After the few more crowded inner rings, marking the early years of the tree, the rings were often considerably more than an inch in breadth—a marvellous thing to behold, representing a scarcely credible rate of growth. Doubtless the specimen was exceptional ; but trees grow at very different rates in different soils and climates ; and it is a well-established fact that they gallop in one particular district of New Zealand. They grow there perhaps twice as fast as in Newfoundland or North Shropshire, both good spruce districts. The soil, a sort of pumice, is ideal for pines but useless for agriculture ; and it is good to know the New Zealand Government is doing much what our Forestry Commission is doing at Thetford, and steadily afforesting. But economy forbids more than a petty scale. Forests vanish ten—even twenty—times as fast as they are renewed. a *
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