Connecticut western news., 1889-05-22
TREE PLANTING
Made Becoming by The Great
 Waste of Timber.
A Plea for General Observance
 of a Tree Planting Day.

trees, which covered most Of 1t like 8 mantle, and gave sustenance as we'll as shelter to it's numberless inhabitants. No other land has such large number of kinds of trees. Counting only those that attain height of. thirty feet, Great Britain has twenty nine varieties of na- tive trees; France, thirty four; all Europe, about sixty; while the United States has more than three hundred such varieties, nearly half of the trees of which average height of fifty feet. =.
 The forests above ground, and the forests below, now existing in the form of coal and petroleum, constituted the capital upon which the business of Am erica was originally founded. The first made life possible here, aud then in the fulness of time they made it compara- lively easy for an advanced and highly civilized race to settle and subdue the land, and plant nations upon it.
 We have but to know the history of any settlement in the New World to perceive that, without the forest and the life which the forest nourished, civilized races could not have established them selves in America.
 But the people have wasted this rich inheritance with fearful rapidity. Leav- ing out of view the necessary destruction of forests by the settlers of the country, there is at this moment in the United States as much wood in the shape of fences as could be grown on twenty-five million acres of land.
 The timber is cut from forty thousand acres of forest every year for railroad ties; six hundred thousand acres are de- nuded every year to get supply of fuel; and seven millions of acres more for timber and boards. ..-.
 At the rate of destruction twenty years ago, it is computed that the United States in the year 1925 would not have had left one acre of accessible timber land. We should have stripped the wilderness bare of its garment of trees.
 Happily, many substitutes have been found for wood. Wire, without the odious and cruel barbs, is fencing mill ions of acres, and fencing them we'll. The legislatures of several Western States have acted boldly and wisely in promoting the plantation of trees, and every year Arbor Day, at least, call the attention of the whole country to the importance of tree planting.
 MT. Bella Hubbard of Detroit, in his ''Memorials of Half a century," predicts that in another quarter of a century the Western States will be abundantly pro- vided with forest, and that the Eastern States will be the treeless region. We hope that both sections will be wise in time, and plant trees wherever nature favors and circumstances justify plant ing them, and where is not this true9 Some kind of tree will grow anywhere except on the bare rock.
 Trees grow with startling rapidity when once they get a good start. There are woods within few miles of Chicago which really look like the primeval for est, although not forty years have rolled away since the land was bare, fat prai- rie Mr. Hubbard, the worthy and in- teresting chronicler just mentioned, has proved by experiment on his own land that our forest trees will moro than double their size in ten years. Of one of his plantations he reports:
 ''Each tree had in the first ten years consid erably more than doubled in the diameter of trunk, and at the end of the second decade the elm had trebled and the maple quadrupled the original girth." In other words, the wood of his trees in- creased sixteen times its original bulk in twenty years.
 There is many an abandoned hill farm of New England that only needs to be planted with the right kinds of young trees to become in twenty years valuable property, and rapidly increasing proper ty, besides contributing it's quota of cool ness, moisture and protection to the sur rounding region. The mere plan ting of the roadsides with trees would be a boon to man and beast. - Youth's Companion.
 Ingenious Device of Thieves.
 A new device of the thieves, and one of