A True Recipe

afterwards will take back the same thing that you will have brought there. This is how everyone must take pains to understand their art; and why it is required that farmers have some Philosophy: or otherwise, they do nothing but abort the earth and bruise the trees. The abuses that they commit every day on the trees compel me to speak thus with affection.

You pretend here that trees are like men, and it seems they cause you great pity: you say that the farmers bruise them, here is a statement that gives me occasion to laugh.

On the cutting of woods It is the nature of fools and enemies of science: however, I know well what I am saying, for in passing through the coppices, I have contemplated several times the manner of cutting the woods, and I have seen that the woodcutters of this country, in cutting their coppices, left the stump or trunk that remained in the earth all split, broken, and splintered, not caring for the trunk, provided they had the wood that is produced by the said trunk, even though they expected that every five years the trunks would produce as much again. I marvel that the wood does not cry out from being so villainously bruised. Do you think that the stump which is thus split and splintered in several places does not feel the fraction and extortion that will have been done to it? Do you not know well that the winds and rains will bring certain dusts into the splits of the said stump, which will cause the stump to rot in the middle, and it will not be able to resolve itself, and it will be forever sick from the extortion that will have been done to it? And to make you understand these things better, contemplate a little the alder trees, which on a single level produce several branches that grow directly upward in a short time. And these having reached the thickness or thereabouts of a man's arm, one comes to cut them, and the same year that the said branches will have been cut, near and adjoining the cut of them, there will come out a number of shoots, which again will come to the same thickness as the aforesaid: and by such means the head of the sapwood will thicken in this place, after several years one will have cut its branches, of which some make hoops, and stakes