MR. FOESYTH ON GAME PRESERVES AND FENCES. 245 



poison. I particularly allude to the natural order of Crowfoots, 

 which contains, besides Crowfoots, many other dangerous species, 

 whose poisonous properties are intense after a long course of 

 dry weather ; and if tiie natural instinct of the animals were not 

 a better guide than the Botany of the cultivators to enable the 

 cows to discriminate their food, they would assuredly get poi- 

 soned. Apropos to the grass-field is the ridge of tall ligneous 

 and herbaceous weeds, which by courtesy may be called the 

 hedgerow. But supposing the fence to be what it very seldom 

 is, a first-rate tall thick thorn hedge, composed of quicksets 

 which are said to be " unequalled either in Europe or America 

 for a hedge-plantation," still I am at a loss to find its virtues and 

 importance to the farmer. But as the Hawthorn is a common 

 plant I have taken the liberty to examine it, and think and judge 

 of its merits from the evidence before me. A common Haw- 

 thorn hedgerow then, occupies an extensive ridge of deep land, 

 well laid up to meet the direct rays of the sun, and at the same 

 time well drained and well watered, having a special ditch or 

 gutter cut on each side for its own private accommodation ; — an 

 arrangement, by-the-by, worthy of imitation with more valuable 

 crops. The hedgerow being thus comfortably situated, thrives 

 well, and produces — what ? Nothing but thorns or prickles ! 

 and seeds fit for little else but to increase thorns : its wood 

 shabby in size, and generally shaky in quality, seldom reaches 

 the character of timber, and is mostly faggot-wood, scarcely pay- 

 ing for the labour of cutting ; its foliage is of no value ; its spray 

 is prickly and unimportant ; its flowers are of a sickly pale 

 colour, and of a strong heavy odour ; yet after all it has virtues, 

 and they are all concentrated in one point — the point of the 

 spine. The beautiful fields of England are everywhere tied 

 round or wrapt up with this plant and other weeds equally va- 

 lueless ; these thorns have got possession of the best of the land, 

 and from their strength of root and spine, bid fair to keep it as 

 a treasure to the botanist, whose researches furnish us with abun- 

 dance of arguments to the point in hand, for we find the locali- 

 ties of nearly one half of all the poisonous and uninteresting 

 species of native plants marked as abounding in the pasture- 

 fields, and particularly in the hedge-banks ; and if any argument 

 could arouse farmers to a sense of the low ebb to which this 

 branch of agriculture has settled, surely this might, when they 

 see the pasture-field, not " subdued," but asserting its inde- 

 pendence, and producing what it pleases, and the hedgerow that 

 they have drained, fenced, ridged, planted, pruned, and watered, 

 producing only a harvest of spines — teeth of dragons; — for the 

 thorn is a name known from the remotest antiquity— not as a 

 fruit-tree or as a plant to be cultivated — but as a ban-word, 



