Age apart, the value of Scots deal varies much according to the manner in which it is grown. It is not the most picturesque pines that yield the finest timber; for the result of growing singly or in scattered groups is a spreading branchy habit, causing coarse, knotty wood. Enormous quantities of Scots pine from Scandinavia and pinaster from France, twenty to thirty-five years old, are imported into Great Britain for pit-props. These might be just as well grown in the British Isles, to the great advantage of rural employment; but British foresters are only now beginning to understand the economic management of timber crops. The great majority of woodlands in these islands have been ruined by over-thinning. Welsh mineowners decline to use the knotty British-grown pines so long as they can get clean-grown French timber. Happily, a better understanding of the principles of economic forestry is being arrived at in this country, so that more satisfactory results may be expected in the future. Scots pine should be grown in close canopy--that is, with a continuous cover of foliage throughout the wood--until the trees are seventy or eighty years old. By that time long, clean boles will have been formed, and the forest may be dealt with according to the views of the owner, whether his object be profit or beauty; for, unlike the oak, the Scots pine may be isolated from his fellows after reaching maturity without suffering in constitution. The mildness and humidity of the British climate are unfavourable to the production of the best quality of deal, promoting, as they do, over-rapid growth and, in consequence, wide annual rings in the stem. The forester's object should be to check this by growing the trees so close that increase of trunk diameter may be retarded, and the annual rings crowded into small space until the trees are near maturity. That is the secret of the superior quality and durability of Russian and Scandinavian deals over all but the finest British pine. [Illustration: FLOWER AND FRUIT OF SCOTS PINE]