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Excursions by Henry David Thoreau
page 102 of 227 (44%)
woods; for I assert that if an oak-tree has not grown within ten miles,
and man has not carried acorns thither, then an oak wood will not spring
up _at once_, when a pine wood is cut down.

Apparently, there were only pines there before. They are cut off, and
after a year or two you see oaks and other hard woods springing up there,
with scarcely a pine amid them, and the wonder commonly is, how the seed
could have lain in the ground so long without decaying. But the truth is,
that it has not lain in the ground so long, but is regularly planted each
year by various quadrupeds and birds.

In this neighborhood, where oaks and pines are about equally dispersed,
if you look through the thickest pine wood, even the seemingly unmixed
pitch-pine ones, you will commonly detect many little oaks, birches, and
other hard woods, sprung from seeds carried into the thicket by squirrels
and other animals, and also blown thither, but which are over-shadowed and
choked by the pines. The denser the evergreen wood, the more likely it is
to be well planted with these seeds, because the planters incline to
resort with their forage to the closest covert. They also carry it into
birch and other woods. This planting is carried on annually, and the
oldest seedlings annually die; but when the pines are cleared off, the
oaks, having got just the start they want, and now secured favorable
conditions, immediately spring up to trees.

The shade of a dense pine wood, is more unfavorable to the springing up of
pines of the same species than of oaks within it, though the former may
come up abundantly when the pines are cut, if there chance to be sound
seed in the ground.

But when you cut off a lot of hard wood, very often the little pines mixed
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