FOR TIMBER PURPOSES. 219 



tion for the site than transplanted seedlings bought and sent 

 from a distance, and probably from a very different position. It 

 is to treatment of this description that the marvellous achieve- 

 ments of the kite Mr Humphrey Graham of Belstane, in success- 

 fully rearing to timber size almost every species of the newer coni- 

 ferse in the poor bleak soil of the top of the Pentland Hills, in Mid- 

 Lothian, are to be attributed ; and were more care shown to this 

 branch of arboriculture, namely, to the growing plants from good 

 seed, in a small nursery on the estate which they are intended to 

 adorn, there would be fewer records of failure in early years of 

 several of the varieties. It is the same law, which is so well 

 known in the agricultural world, that operates in the aboricul- 

 tural field in this particular branch of Nature's economy. In 

 high districts where the climate is cold, and the summers are 

 short, we find the crops shorter and later, and field operations of 

 all kinds carried on long after similar work is completed in the 

 lower and earlier districts ; and so it is with the tree seedlings 

 of such sites. The operations of third growths are retarded, and 

 Nature is, as it were, by slow degrees in the early years of the 

 plant, made to alter her period of shooting into animal activity 

 to a later date, so as to accommodate the life and functions of the 

 seedling to the new conditions in its adopted sphere; and as 

 " hahit becomes a second nature," the seedling conifer sprouted and 

 grown from its infancy under circumstances of climate somewhat 

 uncongenial to its nature in its own habitats, becomes an altered 

 variety in constitution, and acquires the ability to withstand 

 the vicissitudes of temperature and exposure, which it would 

 not acquire in its own country, or even at lower and more shel- 

 tered positions in Britain. 



It will, of course, be apparent,, from the foregoing remarks, 

 that the results of the progress of the Taxodiiun sempervircns, 

 since its introduction into this country, are yet too premature and 

 recent to enable us to express anything like a definite opinion as 

 to its future value, if more widely planted, as a profitable timber- 

 producing tree, or of the rank which its wood might take in 

 general estimation, and in comparison with our already well- 

 known home woods. In those cases to which, in this paper, 

 reference has been made, and which have come more im- 

 mediately under personal observation, it appears that where 

 the Taxodium has required to be cut (town from some 

 cause or otlier, the reports of the appearance and quality of 

 its wood are, upon the whole, promising and favourable. That 

 it is a rapid grower in good deep soil in chalks there is no doubt ; 

 and that the wood is well-coloured and grained — light, soft, and 

 easily worked, and of a toughish, libry nature, like common saugh. 

 From cutting largish branches ]\Ir Frost, of Dropmore, considers 

 the wood likely to prove good for timber; and the opinion of Mr 

 M'Laren,the intelligent forester at Ilopetoun, is, that while it grows 



