of those now growing in this country, as it was a favorite source; it is said to have been raised from a rod that with others formed the outer part of a package arrived from Spain, and which the poet planted, thinking it exhibited some signs of vitality.

(1529.) Of the poplars the Abele (P. alba), and the Aspen (P. tremula), with the Lombardy species (P. fastigiata or dilatata), are the most common here. The first is one of the more valuable, its wood being in much request by turners, and its lightness also recommends it for the construction of portable wooden vessels, such as butchers' trays, troughs, &c. The second affords a very light white timber, now chiefly used by patten-makers.

(1530.) Monkish chroniclers report that the cross was made of aspen wood, and hence they would account for the trembling of the leaves, which they affirm have never rested since the crucifixion.

(1531.) The Lombardy poplar is peculiarly fertile in its growth, but not without beauty; in port it resembles the cypress, and its wood is well fitted for packing-cases and boxes, as nails do not split it. In Lombardy all the vessels in which the grapes are carried home from the vineyards are of poplar plank.

(1532.) The seed-down of the various poplars, as well as that of the willows, is sometimes used for stuffing cushions, either alone or mixed with other materials: from it paper has been also manufactured. In Kamtschatka the inner bark is occasionally made into bread; and in Sweden the leaves and young shoots are gathered as winter fodder for sheep. The buds both of the P. alba and tremula have a peculiarly pleasant smell in spring, and yield a resinous substance likened to storax; but P. balsamifera affords a much more abundant supply, which is collected for medicinal purposes, and is brought into Europe from Canada in shells. It is said to be diuretic and antiscorbutic: the bark of P. tremulöides is also prescribed as a febrifuge in the United States. The bark of P. tremula is the favorite food of the beaver; it is likewise used, from its lightness, as net-floats by fishermen instead of corks. Poplar wood does not take fire rapidly, and rarely bursts into flame, it is therefore well fitted for heating ovens, but a bad fuel for common purposes.

(1533.) BETULACEE. The birch (Betula), and the alder (Alnus), formerly

considered a species of the former genus, although now generically distinguished, are associated in a common type, the BETULACEE.

(1534.) The Betulacea are either trees or shrubs with exarticulate branches; the leaves are alternate and simple; the costulæ run direct from the midrib to the margin, which is either toothed or serrate; and the stipulæ are caducous. The flowers are monoecious, and the inflorescence in cylindrical or subrotund aments. The stamineous flowers, generally naked, are occasionally surrounded by a three or four lobed calyx, and spring from the axillæ of imbricated bracteæ. The stamina are variable in number, for the most part discrete, rarely monadelphous, and the anthers are two-celled.

The bractea of the pistilline aments are generally deciduous, but occasionally persistent, and lignescent; and from the axillæ of each scale spring two or three flowers destitute of perianth, each consisting of a superior two-celled germen, with connate or obsolete styles and elongated filiform stigmata. The ovules are one in each cell, attached to the upper part of the placenta. The fruit is a strobiliform ament, the pericarp dry and indehiscent with membranaceous winged edges, two-celled, or by abortion one-celled and one-seeded. The seeds downless, pendulons, and exalbuminous. The embryo straight, the radicle superior, and the cotyledons epigean, and during germination foliaceous.

(1535.) Hence, differentially considered, the Betulacea are foliose Quercina, with a free two-celled germen, definite pendulous ovules, and downless seed-coats. (1536.) The wood of the alder is valued for works exposed to the action of water, especially such as are constantly submerged. Before the iron manufacture was so much improved, alder was in much request for water-pipes, on account of the ease with which it can be perforated when green: it is also valuable as affording one of the best charcoals, some persons say superior to the willow, for the manufacture of gunpowder; and no other wood forms carbon that answers so well for galvanic experiments, alder-charcoal being always preferred for the points that connect the poles of voltaic batteries and other similar apparatus. The bark is used both by dyers and tanners, the sap being of a yellow colour and very astringent. In decoction it is employed as a gargle in relaxations of the mucous membrane of the fauces; and in double the dose of cinchona it has been administered with success in cases of ague.

(1537.) The birches are not only beautiful trees, but, from growing where other wood is scarce, often valuable as timber, and from intermediately as well as directly affording food to man. Ornithologists affirm that the birches form the principal attraction to the birds which are found in such plenty in high northern latitudes, the catkins yielding them food in the spring, and the seeds during the remainder of the year. The grouse and ptarmigans seem to prefer the B. nana, the smaller birds the B. alba. Many indeed are the economical purposes to which the various parts of these plants have been applied in countries unblessed with a luxuriant vegetation. In the northern parts of Europe, and even in Scotland, the bark is used to tan leather and to make ropes; and the outer rind, which contains a resinous matter, the Highlanders call Meillag, and once were wont to burn instead of candles. With fragments dexterously braided or interwoven, the Laplanders make shoes and baskets; and large thick pieces, which easily separate from the wood and form hollow cylinders, or those which are flattened out and a hole made at one end for the neck, like a drayman's leathern apron, they are said

to use as surtouts to keep off the rain. The Americans make entire canoes of birch-bark, especially of that of the B. papyracea, which is hence called “ canoe birch," and the weight of one of these vessels, large enough to hold four persons, does not exceed fifty pounds. The Russians, Poles, and Swedes, use birch bark likewise to cover their houses instead of tiles. The inner bark was one of the materials on which the ancients wrote before the invention of printing. The wood was formerly used by the highlanders to make their arrows, but it is now converted into ploughs, carts, rakes, and most of the rustic implements of agriculture. The smaller branches are made into hurdles, broom-handles, &c. and the pliant twigs into rods and besoms. By the turner the wood is esteemed for making trenchers, bowls, spoons, ladles, &c. and the knobby excrescences afford a beautifully veined wood. It is also prized as fuel, forms good charcoal, and yields an excellent lamp-black for making printers' ink.

The black birch of America (B. lenta), called also mountain mahogany, from the beauty of its wood, affords one of the hardest timbers of the whole genus, and is perhaps the most valuable.

(1538.) A pyrogenous oil is procured from the bark of the white birch by distillation, which has a very peculiar odour; it is with this oil that skins are dressed in Russia, and to it the Russia leather owes its fragrance. It is said to be inimical to insects, and hence such leather is in great request for bookbinding: many attempts have been made to prepare a similar article in this country and in France, but they have all been hitherto unsuccessful.

(1539.) The sap of the birch is convertible into wine, vinegar, and spirit, and from it sugar may be obtained. From a large tree tapped in the spring several gallons of saccharine sap may be drawn daily without obvious injury to the plant, which forms when fresh an agreeable beverage, and when fermented an intoxicating liquor.

The weeping birch (B. pendula), is one of the most graceful of alpine plants, and when of a large size, its pendant branches, not thicker than common packthread, are often thirty or forty feet in length. Coleridge, in the true spirit of poetry, has called it the "Lady of the Woods."

(1540.) The Betulacea, Salicacea, Myricacea, and Casuarinacea, though differing in the several particulars described, all agree in having the germen free and superior, which circumstance contrasts them with the two remaining types, Corylacea and Juglandacea, included in this section, in which the germen is inferior, and the tube of the calyx adnate. Hence two subsections are distinguishable, the Betuliana and the Corylianæ, in the first of which not only is the germen free, but the flowers, both the stamineous and the pistilline ones, are disposed in aments; while it will be found that in the second, besides the adherent calyx, which is the essential sign, the stamineous flowers alone are disposed in aments, the pistilline ones being subsolitary, and the bracteæ, in general, collected into whorls, called involucra, thus often forming a cup-shaped organ, or cupule, as in the acorn; whence indeed one type has been by some botanists named the Cupulifera.

(1541.) CORYLACEE. The oak, the hazel, the hornbeam, the chesnut, and the beech, which are associated to form this type, are trees or shrubs with muchbranched stems, round and exarticulate; their leaves are alternate, simple, and

stipulate, with costo-marginal costulæ, and serrate or pinnati-lobed, rarely entire edges; the stipulæ are free and caducous.

The flowers are monoecious, the stamineous ones collected into cylindrical or rarely roundish scaly catkins; the stamina variable in number (from four to twentyfour), arising from the scaly bracteæ, or from a squamaceous (four to six cleft) calyx. Filaments mostly free, rarely connate, anthers erect and two-celled; the connectivum continuous with the filament, and sometimes prolonged into a beard. The pistilline flowers are either arranged in aments, or contained within an involucre that becomes coriaceous or woody, and surrounds or includes the fruit. The perianth is adherent to the germen, the limb being obsolete or very minute. The inferior germen is two to six celled, the ovules one to two in each cell and pendulous, the styles two to six, often connate, the stigmata free.

The fruit is a gland or nut, by abortion one-celled, and often only one-seeded. The seed pendulous and exalbuminous; the embryo large, the small radicle superior, and the cotyledons plano-convex, fleshy, or foliaceous; hypogean in the first case, and epigean in the second, [§ 1521, B.]

(1542.) Hence, differentially considered, the Corylacea are cupuliferous Quercina, with subamentaceous flowers, inferior ovaries, pendulous seeds, and smooth cotyledons.

(1543.) Few trees have been more highly and more constantly valued than the oak, and still fewer have been esteemed in different ages from such different causes; for seldom as acorns are eaten now, and much as oaken timber is at present worth, it was formerly for the fruit alone that the tree was prized. At one time, in most countries, when the mind was as uncultured as the soil, the rude unsettled tribes sought from the trees of the forest their chief supplies of vegetable food. Not that the oak was the exclusive source, but as being the principal of the gland-bearing trees, its name was given to several of the others, such as the chesnut and the beech ; and the term gland, like βαλανος or γαλανος, seems also to have been extended to eatable fruits in general: thus the date was called glans Phoenicia, the chesnut glans Sardinia, beech-mast glans fagi, and the walnut glans Jovis or juglans: just as with us acorn is but an abbreviated form of aac, or oak-corn; corn and kernel being common names for seeds, and the former having become the collective denomination of the cereal grains, by which the use of most others has been superseded.

(1544.) The food of the Balanophagi, it will hence be evident, was not so despicable as it has been sometimes thought to have been, and, besides the inclusion of various fruits under the common name of glands, the acorns of many of the levantine and other exotic oaks, such as the Q. Ballota, Q. Ilex, and especially the Q. Esculus, bear fruit which is even now esteemed and eaten in Spain, and Barbary, as chesnuts are in the more northern parts of Europe.

In Britain, although it is unknown that acorns ever formed the common food of the inhabitants, it was for them alone that the oak was prized, as furnishing the chief support of the large herds of swine on which our forefathers fed. Woods, of old, were valued according to the number of hogs they could fatten, and so rigidly were the forest-lands surveyed, that in ancient-records, such as the Doomesday book, woods are mentioned of "a single hog." The right of feeding swine in the woods, called Pannage, formed, some few centuries ago, one of the

most valuable kinds of property. With this right monasteries were endowed, and it often constituted the dowry of the daughters of the Saxon kings. Indeed, the encroachments of the Norman princes on this common right, in their passion for preserving forests for the chase, was one of the more grievous wrongs of which the oppressed people in those times complained, and relief from which was wrung from John, amongst other privileges, on the plains of Runnymede.

(1545.) The history of the oak, whether natural or traditional, is one replete with interest. The reverence in which the tree was held, the oracles sought from it of old, the druidic priesthood, and the superstitions connected with it in other ages, all combine to render the annals of the oak, the chronicles of this forest-king, in great part a history of the human race. Here, however, the introduction of such memorials would be out of place, and the curious in these matters are referred to my Amanitates Querneæ, in which the most important particulars will be found condensed.

(1546.) Upwards of a hundred species of oak are enumerated in Sprengel's catalogue, the majority of which are natives of the New World. The most important of these many species are the Q. navalis (pedunculata vel Robur), or ship oak, and the Q. virens, for timber; the Q. Suber or cork-oak, for its useful bark, Q. infectoria for its galls, and the Q. agilops, coccifera, and tinctoria, which yield the Velani acorns, the Kermes, and the Quercitron bark.

(1547.) The British naval oak, our great father of ships, the timber of which is unrivalled for its strength and durability, has been frequently confounded with one or two other species, also growing in this country, the wood of which is far less valuable and enduring, and to their substitution for the true naval oak, the destructibility of many modern-built vessels has been, with justice, in great part attributed.

(1548.) The oak which yields the inferior timber is said to have been introduced into this island from the continent, and from the freedom of its growth, and the abundance of fruit it bears, to have established itself firmly in various parts of the country: it has even been encouraged unwittingly in plantations, through the ignorance of those entrusted with their care, although the error has been frequently pointed out by botanists. The true naval oak is easily distinguishable from the others growing wild in Britain, by the acorns being seated on long stalks, and the leaves subsessile or without any, [§ 1521, B. a.]; while the inferior oak has sessile acorns and leaves with lengthened footstalks.

(1549.) Much indeterminateness exists in the nomenclature of these several oaks; for, although distinguished by Ray, they were all included by Linneus in his single species Robur, and since again separated, the classic adjunct has been given to each of the three species by different botanists. Smith calls the peduncled oak Q. Robur, and thinks that Willdenow was countenanced in a wilful error by the Hortus Kewensis, in giving that title to the sessile fruited one; whereas, from the description of Pliny, and the older writers, it would seem to belong most correctly to the downy-leaved or Durmast species, the chêne noir of the French for the wood of this oak is of a dark colour, as described by Festus Pompeius. It agrees also with the account of Pliny, who calls it 'Robur exalburnatum,' and says 'Robur marina aqua corrumpitur,' neither of which descriptions will accord with our naval species. I have hence elsewhere proposed to avoid this perplexity by calling the naval oak Q. navalis, the sessile-fruited