188G.] MISCELLANEOUS. 779 



IVllSCELLANEOUS. 



At a recent lecture delivered in I'hiladelpliia Ly a prominent 

 scientist, the gentleman said it takes a prodigious amount of vege- 

 table matter to form a layer of coal ; that the present growth of 

 the -world would make a layer only one-eighth of an inch thick, 

 and that it would take a million years to fornr a coal-bed 100 

 feet thick. 



Sicily now and thkx. — Look at Sicily, once the great grain 

 reservoir for Piome. Since the island of plenty was despoiled of its 

 forests, it gradually lost its fertility and the mildness of its climate. 

 The ruins of proud and opulent Syracuse lay in a desert, covered by 

 sand, which the hot sirocco carried over the Mediterranean Sea from 

 Africa. A few isolated, well-watered, and carefully-cultivated dis- 

 tricts of very limited extent, is all that is left to remind the 

 tourist of the bygone glory of Sicily. 



The Forest of Dean, 14 miles west of Gloucester, covers about 

 24,000 acres. The woods, originally planted for the supply of 

 ships for the navy, are in good plight. The Eoyal Commission of 

 1871 reported that there are about 265,000,000 tons in the forest 

 coal-fields. The output is about 900,000 a year. The Crown 

 revenues from the coal and iron amount to some £10,000 to 

 £12,000 a year. 



Practical Ajiekican Forestry. — If the planting of new forests 

 go on as rapidly as it has gone in Kansas, there will soon be no 

 occasion for weeping over the destruction of the old " tinder-box " 

 forests that nature gave us. The assistance of the Government of 

 Kansas appears to have been very successful in the aid of forestry, 

 over 20,000,000 forest trees being under successful culture, and 

 there are about 150,000 acres of artificially planted forest trees. 



The Sexes ix Hollies. — I can give definite assurance that the 

 hedgehog in all its forms is of the masculine gender. In the course 

 of some thirty years' observation, I have not seen a berry on any 

 form of ferox, but some male hollies show an occasional berry. It 

 cost me fully twenty years of watching to determine the sex of the 

 beautiful waterer's holly, for in the record made of observations on 

 my own collection it is entered as sometimes a male and sometimes 

 a female, but as, generally speaking, being indisposed to flower. But 

 I had the good fortune to settle the matter in the spring of the year 

 1879, when reviewing the flowers of the hollies in Messrs. Veitch & 

 Sons' nurseries at Kingston. There I found on a waterer an unmis- 

 takable male flower, and I booked him as a male. In a few minutes, 



