The plantations of Larch made by James Duke of Athol, between 1733 and 1759, amounted to one thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight trees. Of these, eight hundred and seventy-three were cut down between 1809 and 1816. The Duke of Athol had the satisfaction to behold a British frigate built in 1819 and 1820 at Woolwich yard, out of timber planted at Blair and Dunkeld, by himself and the Duke his predecessor. And the extensive and increasing Larch forests of those districts may yet be called upon largely to supply both naval and mercantile dock-yards. Mankind are prone to cherish and embalm the memory of individuals whose claims to notoriety have originated in their wide-spread destruction of the human race; but they are too apt to forget those who have been the benefactors of mankind. That a vessel formed from trees of his introduction and planting should have waved the British flag over the ocean, is likely to be all the reward contemporaneous or posthumous, which will ever adhere to the noble Duke, for the great good he has done to his country, and for the blessed legacy he has left to his descendants, by the plantation of about fifteen thousand five hundred and seventy-three English acres of ground, which consumed above twenty-seven millions, four hundred and thirty-one thousand, and six hundred trees.
