1886.] MISCELLANEOUS. 783 



connected more or less with the navigaljle canals, and thereby with 

 the distant markets; and finally, 2,000,000 acres have been thrown 

 open to cultivation, althoiigli only 120,000 acres have been actually 

 occupied up till now. Besides making the canals and ditches, the 

 engineers have built 179 bridges, bored 152 wells from forty feet 

 to eighty feet deep, and 425 from twenty feet to forty feet, and 

 have made a survey of 20,000 square miles of country hitherto 

 unmapped. When their task is finished, Eussia will have effaced 

 from the map of Europe one of the oldest and toughest bits of 

 savage nature of the Continent, and a few years will suffice to 

 render the Pinsk marshes indistinguishable from the rest of the 

 cultivated region of the sources of the Dnieper. From an 

 engineering, geological, and scientific point of view, the work is 

 one of special interest. 



RoBEKT DouciLAss, the best authority on the subject, claims that 

 our native white spruce is superior to the ISTorway spruce in vitality. 

 After the Xorway spruce has reached the age of thirty years and 

 assumed a grand size it begins to decay, first by loss of its foliage 

 near the trunk, and which gradually extends toward the extremities 

 of the branches, and then its leader dies, and the annual lateral 

 growth is very small, and the whole tree takes on a rusty, unhealthy 

 appearance, its disfigurement increasing until death ensues. The 

 white spruce, AUcs alba, is a much longer-lived tree ; it is of slower 

 growth than the Norway spruce, but continues in vigour long years 

 after the latter has lost all claims to beauty. In planting it is best 

 to group these two trees together in such a manner that a good 

 effect will be retained when, on account of old age, the Norway 

 spruce shall have been removed. — Viclcs Magazine for December. 



The Lotus Teee. — It is not often, says the St. James's Gazette, 

 that we find elucidations of ancient and modern poets in a Blue 

 Book, and we must not grumble if the effect is to reduce them to 

 prose. In a very interesting report of an official visit made to our 

 vice-consular ports in Tunis by Colonel Playfair, Her Majesty's 

 Consul at Algiers, which has just been issued, there is a notice of 

 the island of the Lotophagi, the modern Djerba. Here is the first 

 mention of the spot, translated by Colonel Playfair from the Odyssey, 

 Book IX. : — " On the tenth day we set foot on the land of the lotus- 

 eaters. . . . Now, when we had tasted meat and drink, I sent forth 

 certain of my company to go and make search what manner of men 

 they were who live here upon the earth by bread ; and I chose out 

 two of my fellows, and sent a third with them as herald. Then 

 straightway they went and mixed with the men of the lotus-eaters ; 

 and so it \vas that the lotus-eaters devised not death for our fellows, 

 but gave them of the lotus to taste. Now whosoever of them did 



