The improvement which wine derives from keeping is unquestionably the cause of its being kept; but when on this account the wine-merchant has kept his wine, the additional price which he is enabled to put upon it is regulated upon principles totally distinct from the average degree of improvement which the wine acquires. It is regulated exclusively, as stated by Mr. Ricardo, by the average profits which the capital engaged in keeping the wine would have yielded if it had been actively employed; and that this is the regulating principle of the additional price, and not the degree of improvement, is quite certain: because it would be universally allowed that if, in the case supposed by Mr. Macculloch, the ordinary rate of profits had been 20 per cent., instead of 10 per cent., a cask of new wine, worth 50_l._, after it had been kept a year, would have been increased in value 10_l._ instead of 5_l._, although the processes of nature and the improvement of the wine were precisely the same in the two cases; and there cannot be the least doubt, as I said before, that if the quality of wine, by a year’s keeping, were ordinarily improved in a degree ten times as great as at present, the prices of wines would not be raised; because, if they were so raised, all wine-merchants who sold kept wines would be making greater profits than other dealers. Nothing then can be clearer than that the additional value of the kept wine is derived from the additional amount of profits of which it is composed, determined by the time for which the capital was advanced and the ordinary rate of profits. The value of the oak tree of a hundred years’ growth is derived, in a very considerable degree, from the same cause; though, in rich and cultivated countries, where alone it could be worth 25_l._, rent would necessarily form a part of this value. If the number of acorns necessary on an average to rear one good oak were planted by the hand of man, they would be planted on appropriated land; and as land is limited in quantity, the powers of vegetation in the land cannot be called into action by every one who is in possession of acorns, in the same way as the improving operations of nature may be called into action by every person who possesses a cask of wine. But setting this part of the value aside, and supposing the acorns to be planted at a certain expense, it is quite clear, that almost the whole of the remaining value would be derived from the compound interest or profits upon the advances of the labour required for the first planting of the acorns, and the subsequent protection of the young trees. A much larger part, therefore, of the final value of the tree than of the final value of the wine would be owing to profits.