We have admired the beautiful, straight, luxuriant, shoots of the young hollies, thrown out under shelter, and have compared them with the dry stunted shoots of the young holly in the open country, though in the former case their roots had to contend {355} with the roots of larger trees, and in the latter they had the soil to themselves. Experience has proved, that in exposed bleak situations, shelter is necessary to young plants. Transplanted oaks among the roots of young trees, so large as to afford sufficient shelter, very frequently do not succeed, at least without the utmost care in the transplanting, and a considerable deal of labour to prevent the roots of the shelter trees from starving the transplanted ones, unless a very propitious moist summer follow the transplanting. Raising from the seed, which obviates all this, seems therefore the only conveniently practicable way. Yet it must be owned, that the system of raising forests _in situ_ from the seed, appears, as yet, much more successful on paper than on our hills and moors. In endeavouring to confute the opinion, that the oak will not grow throughout Scotland, but in the milder and more propitious situations, Mr Cruickshank adduces the well-known fact, that large oak timber is found in almost every peat-moss. This is a fact worth tracing to its cause. Under Nature’s own conduct, trees advance considerably further into elevated or cold inhospitable regions, than they would otherwise do, by means of the mutual shelter, and of the more hardy kinds acting as an advance guard. Yet there is a limit to this, as the {356} power of ripening seed is not increased by shelter in proportion to the power of growing—perhaps not at all; we instance the Spanish chestnut, which has scarcely ever been known to ripen seed in Scotland. Seed-grown trees will, therefore, under Nature’s arrangement, not be found extending much beyond _the line of seed ripening_. From nuts, acorns, and other seeds, fully developed, being found in elevated mosses in this country, other causes than shelter appear to have existed.