Tlie Tree Lifter. By CoL. Geoege Greenwood. 

 London ; Longmans, Green, & Co. 



This is a third edition of a work originally published some thirty 

 years ago by the late Colonel Greenwood, a country gentleman who 

 possessed remarkable facilities for investigating plant life, and a rare 

 amount of assurance for insisting upon his ideas of vegetable physiology, 

 especially in regard to the circulation of the sap, being received by 

 the scientific world as the correct and final solution of that still much 

 involved but highly important physiological question. We do not intend 

 to follow the colonel through what he terms his "facts" of plant 

 growth, by which he attempts to demolish the reasoning of Liebig, Bonnet, 

 Lindley, and other eminent physiologists, in language which at times is 

 more forcible than polite, and which the editor of this edition might have 

 eliminated from the text without detriment either to its clearness or 

 force. The colonel was no believer in the opinion that trees can ever ex- 

 haust the soil in which they grow of the elements which they extract 

 from it during their period of growth, and which he maintains they return 

 to the earth with interest daring the annual fall of the leaf, and the period 

 of their natural decay ; thereby increasing the richness of the soil with 

 each succeeding crop, until " the formation of bogs by the over luxuriance 

 of woods may be one of the causes why many countries have ceased to be 

 covered with forests " ! 



We will pass on from the wild theories and dogmatic assertions of the 

 first three parts into which the book is divided, and make an extract 

 from the fourth part, in which are given some sensible instructions on the 

 important operations of Pruning and Thinning, which will interest our 

 practical readers. He says : — 



" For pruning trees to grow to their greatest possible height, the rules are 

 simple, and are applicable alike to the nursery plant and the largest timber 

 tree : keep a clear leader ; cut off all branches large enough to compete with 

 the stem on which they grow parallel to it ; shrive the stem up one-third of 

 its height; and cut all close to the stem. With these exceptions a tree 

 VOL. I. 2 H 



