TRANSACTIONS. 51 



scarred and gnarled stumpsi, a foot or two at most iu heiglit, 

 sending forth a couple of annual shoots, "which are tied 

 with bark to a short stake, and growing generally on mea- 

 gre and forbidding soils. It is not here, then, that you are 

 to look for the poetry of the vineyard. 



Such is the asnect in which the northern and western 

 portions of the empire present themselves to an American 

 agricultural observer. Let us now turn southwards. Here, 

 approaching Burgundy, the native soil of the most gene- 

 rous of French wines, we meet the mulberry in all its va- 

 rieties ; the fig, a low, scraggy tree, which, with its short, 

 thick, angularly disposed branches would, but for its large, 

 deeply lobate leaf, much resemble the American sumach ; 

 then groups of the picturesquely beautiful stone pine, 

 famed for the edible, nut-like seed which lies beneath the 

 scales of its large cone, and often called, from the shape 

 and shade of its broad spreading top, the umbrella pine. 

 Somewhat further south, occurs the olive, a moderately 

 sized tree, very frequently with a hollow trunk, with slender 

 boughs and twirlins: evergreen foliage, dead green on the 

 upper surface and ash color beneath, much resembling that 

 of some of our willows. The olive resembles the willow, 

 too, in being one of the few apparent exceptions to the 

 rule, that all the forms of organic life have their natural 

 limit of growth and dimension, upon attaining which, they 

 begin to decline and die, death itself being often the le- 

 gitimate and necessary final result of the very processes 

 bv which life is invigorated and sustained. In most trees, 

 the leading top-shoot and the lateral branches continue^ 

 under favorable circumstances, to lengthen, until they at- 

 tain a distance from the root to which the organic and in- 

 organic forces that propel the sap can no longer convey 

 that fluid in due quantity and condition. Then the re- 

 motest twigs wither and perish for lack of sustenance, the 

 cells and vessels become clogged with the nutriment elabo- 

 rated for more distant members, disease in various forms 



