The locust can be cultivated to advantage as a timber tree, only upon deep, mellow, and rather rich, sandy soils; there, its growth is wonderfully vigorous, and an immense number may be grown upon a small area of ground. In clayey, heavy, or strong loamy soils the tree never attains much size, and is extremely liable to the attacks of the borer, which renders its wood in a great measure valueless. In particularly favorable situations its culture may be made extremely profitable.* (* There is a well known instance of the profit of this tree, which we perceive has found its way into the memoirs of the Agricultural Society of Paris. A farmer on Long Island, some sixty years ago, on the year of his marriage, planted fourteen acres of his farm with the Yellow locust. When his eldest son married at twenty-two, he cut twelve hundred dollars' worth of timber from the field, as a marriage portion, which he gave his son to buy a settlement in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, then considered a part of the "western country." Three years after the locust grove yielded as much for a daughter; and in this way his whole family were provided for; as the rapidity with which the young suckers grew up fully repaired the breaches made in the fourteen acres.)
