We have had many inquiries lately for Corsican pine trees, and one of our patrons has taken us rather severely to task for not keeping up with the times, and growing so few kinds. Our experience with this tree, if published in the Monthly, may prevent parties from importing the seedlings, as threatened by the party referred to above. Our experience is as follows. Between twenty-five and thirty years ago, the Corsican pine was lauded very highly in Europe, as growing more rapidly than the larch, etc. I imported the seeds in large quantity, and at a large price. It germinated readily, and grew very rapidly, but the first year after being exposed to the weather, the foliage browned early in winter, proving that it was not suitable for this climate. Hoping that the tree might stand the climate further south, I offered them to parties in the southern trade. We sent a large quantity to a large nursery firm in St. Louis, selling them at the price of Scotch pine. They browned there nearly as badly as with us, so we destroyed our whole stock of them. Again, about seven or eight years ago, Mr. Jos. S. Fay, owner of the large plantation on Cape Cod, wrote me that he had planted the Corsican pine, and it grew more rapidly than other pines.

As we furnish more pine trees for forest planting in New England than in the West, we again imported Corsican pine seeds for that market. While these seedlings were making their first year's growth, I was down on Cape Cod, examining Pitch pine plantations of twenty to thirty years growth, and went to Mr. Fay's to examine the Corsican pines. He told me that he had been sadly disappointed in them. We went and examined them, and they were as complete a failure as in Northern Illinois and St. Louis. And it was a surprise to me to learn from your August number, that the foliage would stand at Philadelphia, but many trees stand at Philadelphia that fail 30 further south, when away from the seashore.

I am even more surprised reading in the Monthly the dimensions of this tree at thirty-six years of age, where it has had room to develop in rich garden ground, and where the climate must be adapted to its growth, or it could not have preserved its lower limbs till thirty-six years old.

Now after all the boasting in Europe about the rapid growth of this tree, it cannot compare with our own White pine. True, it will grow faster the first few years, just as all our native scrub pines so-called - will grow faster than the White; but at thirty-five years, or in one-third of that time, the White pine will outstrip any European pine I have ever had any experience with, and any American, unless it be P. resinosa, which will hold its growth with the White pine for nearly or quite twenty years. And yet we never see the White pine brought to the front as a rapid growing tree.

I have White pines planted on the banks of my ravine, poor gravelly soil. The trees were dug out of the sand dunes on the Lake shore, little miserable scrubs, about a foot high. They have been planted thirty-one years, and I can show a larger girth and greater height than Mr. Buist's thirty-five-year-old tree; but this is not a fair test. Mr. A. R. Whitney, of Franklin Grove, Lee Co., Illinois, eighty-five miles west of Chicago, dug some White pine trees out of a sandy barren in the neighborhood in 1859, that were about a foot in height. He planted them in the sod where they have not since been cultivated. I have seen these trees nearly every year since they were planted, but never noticed that they were doing any better than other White pines.

Last winter Mr. Whitney was taken sick. I went out in January to see him. The snow was over two feet deep under these trees. I girthed them at what I supposed to be three feet above ground. These trees had then made twenty-six years growth since planted, hence were nine years younger than Mr. Buist's Corsican pine. One girthed 5 feet 5 inches, one 5 feet 11 inches, and one 4 feet 11 inches. And yet we never hear a word about the rapid growth of the White pine, while we know that if any such showing could be made for a foreign tree, adapted to nearly all kinds of soil, so free from disease, and the lumber of such value when grown, our eyes would be blurred reading its praises in every horticultural paper, and our ears would be dinned listening to essays and harangues in every forestry convention in the country.

I would have measured another group of White pines, planted by Mr. Whitney's father in 1851, but the snow was so deep, and the thermometer 260 below zero, my fingers declined to serve.

Waukegan, III.

[In conversation recently with a highly intelligent European forester the subject of the Corsican pine was. introduced. His views were just about the same as Mr. Douglas'. "Rapid growing enough when young, but does not make timber of any size, and is not what we want." - Ed. G. M].