Excepting the bare plan itself, which is certainly very plausible, there is nothing in the description {353} of the practice—the preparation of the patches of ground to receive the seed and the subsequent management—which merits attention. His very particular interdiction of the use of manure is, to say the least of it, injudicious—as if it signified to the plant whether it were forced by the use of lime, or by a little putrescent manure, both of which Mr Withers would consider very advantageous; or as if there were much fear on our poor exposed wastes of erring on the side of rendering the plant delicate from over luxuriance; its constitution, on the contrary, would rather be strengthened. Mr Cruickshank, in directing the removal of the fir nurses, one thousand per acre to stand till they have reached twenty-five years, fit for roofing of cottages, and similar purposes; and five hundred till they have reached thirty-five years; his dividing a slaked boll of lime into five hundred spadefuls; and his bestowing no hoeing or weeding upon his seedlings, would show, without his admitting it, that he had never practised this mode of forming plantation. Prefacing this system of rearing oak forest, Mr Cruickshank in rather a clever manner points out its advantages, and also the disadvantages and consequent failures of _planting_ young oak trees in exposed situations. But after all his eulogy, we think he has {354} left something unsaid. The great disadvantage attending transplanting oaks to situations not very favourable to their growth, is, that the plant which, under any circumstances, receives irreparable and often mortal harm, from the severe injuries of removal, has to contend, in this mutilated condition, at the same time with the uninjured occupiers of the soil (the nurses or the native weeds), and with the unpropitious situation; whereas, when the plant springs up from the acorn a native, especially when it is assisted at first by weeding or hoeing, the part above ground being always in proportion to that below, and receiving due nourishment, it contends with the occupiers on more equal terms, and encounters the sterility of the soil, or the severity of the climate, with all its natural powers unimpaired. As it is the natural condition of the seedling to grow up under the shelter of the parent tree, so also does it happen, that it rises under this shelter with greater luxuriance and vigour than when exposed to the evaporation, and parching sun, and battering wind, of the bare country.