Editorial Notes. 457 



public money, as in the Continental schools they are only too apt to 

 learn bad practice and worse habits, which it takes them years to 

 unlearn after they get an appointment and settle in India, and which 

 is the chief cause of much of the dissatisfaction that jjrevails, and the 

 laxity and neglect in forest management of which the country 

 has so much reason to complain. 



During the past fe.w years many of the more recently introduced 

 Conifer^B have been adding a new interest to their charms in the artificial 

 habitats they have acquired in the British Islands, by developing their 

 beautiful and symmetrically shaped cones, thereby enhancing the 

 peculiar beauty of their individual appearance, as well as affording 

 to all lovers of this particularly interesting family an opportunity 

 for studying nature's minute and secret processes of fructification and 

 reproduction. The past season appears to have been peculiarly well 

 adapted for the formation of cones throughout this country ; and we 

 have no doubt that at the forthcoming annual general meeting of the 

 Scottish Arboricultural Society, to be held in Edinburgh on the 6th of 

 November, we shall have ample facilities for admiring many varieties 

 of cones, brought together by foresters from all quarters of the three 

 kingdoms, like the grape clusters of Eshcol of old, to show the 

 abundant fertility of their homes and country. In the meantime 

 it is right that we should advert in the pages of this Journal to 

 a recent unic^ue exhibition of cones grown in the county of Kent, 

 at Linton Park, near Maidstone, the seat of Vicount Holmesdale, 

 by the intelligent forester and gardener, Mr. Malcolm Maclean, and 

 which with characteristic good feeling, as well as patriotic pride, 

 he contributed for exhibition to the recent horticultural show of his 

 former Scotch home in East Lothian, held at North Berwick on the 

 14th and 15th September last, where the magnificent collection was 

 highly admired by a large and fashionable company ; and were 

 deemed by all worthy of a place a,t any metropolitan exhibition 

 where they would have done high credit to their exhibitor, and won 

 fresh honours for Linton Park. The following is a detailed list of the 

 specimens of cones, &c., exhibited : — 



Abies Canadensis I Picea Nordmanniana 



„ Douglasii 



„ Menziesii 



„ nigra 



„ Orientalis 



„ morinda 

 „ excelsa 

 Picea nobilis 



J, Webbiana 



„ pectinata 



„ pinsapo 



„ Cephalonica 

 Araucaria imbricata, branch, 



with cones of 1876 and 1877 

 Cunninghamia Sinensis 

 Pinus pouderosa 

 „ insignia 



