188G.] MISCELLANEOUS. 785 



to colour, remains throughout the most beautiful iu its golden 

 yellow and crimson. Lofty trees and humble undergrowth, and 

 climbing creepers, all alike deck the landscape with every tint that 

 can be borrowed from the light, till the whole looks like the scenery 

 of a fairy tale, and presents a spectacle unknown to the residents 

 of the Old World. Two or three frosty nights in the decline of 

 autumn transform the boundless verdure of a whole empire into 

 every possible tint of brilliant scarlet, rich violet, every shade of 

 brown, vivid crimson, and glittering yellow. The stern, inexorable 

 fir tribes alone maintain their eternal sombre green ; all others, in 

 mountains or in valleys, burst into the most gcorgeous vjegetable 

 beauty, and exhibit the most splendid and most enchanting panorama 

 on earth." 



The trees may outlive the memory of more than one of those in 

 whose honour they were planted. But if it is something to make 

 two blades of grass grow where only one was growing, it is much 

 more to have been the occasion of the planting of an oak which 

 shall defy twenty scores of winters, or of an elm which shall canopy 

 with its green cloud of foliage half as many generations of mortal 

 immortalities. I have written many verses, but tlie best poems I 

 have produced are the trees I planted on the hill-side which 

 overlooks the broad meadows, scalloped and rounded at their edges 

 by loops of the sinuous Housatonic. Nature finds rhymes for them 

 in the recurring measures of the seasons. Winter strips them of 

 their ornaments, and gives them, as it were, in prose translation, 

 and summer re-clothes them in all the splendid phrases of their leafy 

 language. What are these maples and beeches and birches but odes 

 and idyls and madrigals ? What are these pines and firs and 

 spruces but holy hymns, too solemn for the many-hued raiment of 

 their gay deciduous neighbours ? — Oliver Wendell Holmes. 



Sandal- WOOD {Santalum album). — This valuable production of 

 Indian forests has but a very limited distribution, being confined to 

 certain localities in South India, and to a few islands of the Eastern 

 or Malay Archipelago. The tree is an evergreen, and seldom 

 attains 2 5 feet in height. There are many other trees, besides the 

 Santalum album, which come under the designation of " sandal- 

 wood," notably the far-famed sapan wood so largely used in China, 

 and imported into tliat country from the isles of the Banda or Flores 

 Sea. The essential oil obtained from the distillation of the heart- 

 wood and roots of tlie true variety, or Indian sandal- wood, is used 

 as the basis of nearly all ottos manufactured in the country. The 

 perfume has a peculiar fragrance much appreciated in the Hindoo 

 toilette. The paste obtained by rubbing the wood on a stone with 

 a little water is used for painting the body after bathing. These 



