After the preceding parts of this volume had gone to press, we received a copy of Cruickshank’s Practical Planter. We endeavour to give a short view of the contents. The author commences with some general remarks on the expediency and profit of laying uncultivated ground under timber, stating, rather too strongly, the very superior income derivable from forest than from heathy moors, and its advantages to the soil. No doubt, a great portion of the higher and more rocky part of Scotland is susceptible of little other improvement than planting; and, under timber, would produce more than ten times the income that it does in pasture; and the patriotic motive of embellishing his country, and enriching his countrymen, may excuse his having drawn the advantages of planting in rather high colours. Mr Cruickshank’s statement (as he says, designedly kept rather below the truth), that an acre of moor, of average quality, covered with Scotch fir, sixty years {310} planted, would contain 600 trees, value 10s. each, differs considerably from what has come within our experience. The timber of an acre of Scotch fir, sixty years planted in such waste ground as occurs in the valley of the Tay, will not average much more than one hundred pounds per acre on the spot, and laid down on the quay at Newcastle (the place to which the greater part of the Scotch fir on the east of Scotland is carried), would not produce L. 300 per acre. In order the more to encourage planting, Mr Cruickshank runs into a speculative statement of the fertilizing influence of planting upon the soil, in rather a novel manner, leaving out the particular facts, which, he says, had come under his own observation, and adducing one as proof, furnished to him by another person unnamed. We have often had occasion to see ground, which had produced a crop of firs, brought under tillage without any marked fertility beyond the adjacent fields which had been under proper rotation of cropping, certainly inferior to what had lain for the same length of time in natural grass pasture. There is a particular instance in a slight rising ground (diluvial soil) in the Carse of Gowrie, where the fields, since the rooting out of the fir-wood, have not paid seed and labour in corn, though {311} under regular manuring and rotation. There are even varieties of pine, such as the loblolly, which are known to have an influence upon the soil where they grow poisonous to succeeding crops. Mr Cruickshank himself adverts several times to ground which had produced a crop of timber, being _boss_ (hollow) from the roots remaining in the soil, and owing to this hollowness being unsuited for replanting till the roots were removed or consumed. We do not very well comprehend this hollowness, and ascribe the unsuitableness for replanting immediately, rather to exhaustion, or to the formation of something inimical to vegetation, than to any hollowness or manner of arrangement of the soil.