50 



HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



Carmine and all other cochineal colours ; the madders 

 are the only safe substitutes. Iodine, scarlet, the 

 clirome yellows, and all aniline colours, should find 

 no place in the colour box ; the list given above will 

 be found sufficient for nearly every purpose. 



Very good effects are obtainable by the use of black- 

 lead, and for rapid work it offers many facilities. 

 In addition to pencils of the usual kind, some with 

 broad leads will be found useful for covering larger 

 surfaces. Very delicate tints can be made with black- 

 lead powder rubbed on the paper with a suitable 

 leather stump.* Tints of any depth can also be 

 obtained from blacklead used as a water-colour, it is 

 to be procured in cakes. 



Blacklead, charcoal, and chalk drawings can be 

 permanently fixed, by saturating the paper from behind 

 with a varnish composed of bleached shellac and 

 alcohol. This should be very freely applied and 

 dried in a warm room or with caution before a fire. 

 The strength should be such that it will just dry 

 without leaving a gloss on the paper. Winsor and 

 Newton's white lac varnish, mixed with an equal bulk 

 of methylated spiiit, will be the right strength. After 

 this treatment a pencil drawing may be placed in the 

 portfolio, and even exposed to some amount of rubbing, 

 without injury. The varnish does no harm to any 

 water-colour tints that may be used in combination 

 with pencil. 



SWISS TREES. 

 By Edward John Titt, M.D. 



FIR woods are the natural drapery of mountain 

 regions, and the eye never tires of admiring the 

 various ways in which they relieve the monotony of 

 mountains. Sometimes firwoods completely clothe 

 their lower ranges, or else adorn them by various 

 shaped patches of dark green, and they never tire of 

 fringing them with a more or less deeply serrated 

 edge-line. Dr. de Crespigny is right in saying that 

 the Abies excelsa is the prevailing tree, but what 

 the landlord of the Tete Noire Hotel told me of his 

 woods, often applies to other points. According to 

 him, the forest was made up of '^ sapin blanc, 

 sapin rouge and melcze," which is Larch. 



These immense forests belong either to private 

 individuals, to the commune, or to the Canton. The 

 cutting down of these woods is controlled by the 

 Government Inspector of Forests. He does not 

 allow them to be cut when they grow on too per- 

 pendicular a mountain-side, or when the cutting of 

 them would damage a village, and a commune must 

 have his perm.ission to cut down its woods ; whereas, 

 in Italy, it can do so without anybody's permission. 



Foreigners have not our love for trees, they cut 

 them all down without leaving a few choice specimens, 



* The late J. D. Harding used flat blacklead crayons, and 

 also abtump of a peculiar form, resembling a plasterer's trowel. 



and those who go to Switzerland find no fir-wood, 

 within an easy walk of their hotel, better than those 

 on Bagshot heath. Four or five thousand feet above 

 sea level there are still fine fir-trees. I found many 

 seven, nine, and eleven feet in circumference at the 

 Tete N'oire at Rosenlaui ; and in a grand forest, on the 

 way from that enchanting spot to the Great Scheideck, 

 I passed a saw mill, where they were sawing trees 

 three feet in diameter, and the flooring of the new 

 hotels is often made with planks two feet wide. 

 An idea of the grandeur of Swiss subalpine forests, in 

 olden time, may be formed by looking after the 

 stumps of old fir-trees in the fir forests. 



These stumps of veterans, cut off at about three 

 feet from the ground, have become most interesting 

 studies for the botanist and.for the painter. They are 

 of all sizes ; one at Rosenlaui measured twenty-seven 

 feet in circumference, and they have been stumps for so 

 long that their whole substance has decayed, and one 

 can run a walking-stick into and through them. The 

 softness is seldom owing to touchwood, often to dry 

 rot. Many of them retain the sharpness of their 

 original line of section, although clothed with ferns and 

 lichens. In the middle of August some were clothed < 

 with the saffron-coloured fingers of the Cladonia 

 fitrfiiracea, and were gaily decked with the brick- 

 red parts of the Cladonia purpuracea. Many of 

 these huge stumps had subsided into heaps covered 

 with ferns and alpine wild flowers, and from ancestral 

 mould there often grows up a promising young 

 fir-tree. 



On knocking to pieces these stumps, I have some- 

 times found a bit of very hard wood, about eight 

 inches long, curved and shaped like the horn of a 

 cow. Its point was always directed towards the 

 centre of the tree, its outer extremity was still circled 

 by rings of woody fibre, and looked as if a branch 

 had been broken off from it. I do not know whether 

 these bodies have been described, but we were all 

 familiar with sections of them as knots in deal boards. 



On descending from the Col de la Forclaz, the 

 road to Martigny skirts an extensive forest of old 

 larches. They clothe the mountain to the left of the 

 road, far as the eye can see ; many of them must be 

 from twelve to twenty feet in circumference, and they 

 were hearty, though their roots were buried deep under 

 the broken stones that fell from above. At Rosenlaui, 

 the people seem fond of the sycamore ; one was four- 

 teen feet in circumference ; and some had been planted 

 in the open, and were protected from the cattle. 



As we descend to the valleys of Switzerland, we 

 find the beech and Spanish chestnut. I have seen 

 beech woods, but never a fine beech ; the old trees 

 had been ruthlessly cut down long ago. The Spanish 

 chestnut loves the sunny slopes of Alpine valleys and 

 the hill-tops. I do not know a prettier sight than 

 Spanish chestnut woods interspersed with huge fan- 

 tastic boulders, covered with green and golden moss ; 

 but the trees are not so fine in the Rhone valley as 



