NOTES AND QUERIES. 337 



support trees of appropriate kinds. The association estimates that 

 quite 30,000 acres can ultimately be planted, and that 14,000 acres 

 are ready for immediate development. Tt is often said that the 

 Black Country is fated to be for ever a desert, but on the Continent 

 trees flourish upon pit waste, upon furnace slag, and even upon the 

 ash of burnt-out shale. Already there are many trees growing near 

 Walsall, and the Midland Reaftbresting Association deserves a large 

 measure of support in its attempt to grow trees on what is now a 

 barren and desolate waste. — The Timber News. 



Teaching of Forestry in the Provinces. 



The Technical Education Committee of the Fife County Council 

 have issued a circular intimating that they have made an arrange- 

 ment with the Edinburgh and East of Scotland College of 

 Agriculture, under which Mr Fraser Story, who studied Forestry 

 at Edinburgh University and at Eberswalde Forest Academy, will 

 conduct a course of nine lectures and two out-door excursions at 

 Kirkcaldy and Cupar during the months of December, January, 

 and February. In the circular the committee say : " It is the in- 

 tention of the committee in these lectures to provide systematic 

 scientific instruction of such a kind as to be readily adapted to 

 local circumstances. As far as possible the class lessons will be 

 of a practical kind, and further provision will be made by which 

 the students will see for themselves the best methods to be carried 

 out in daily practice." 



Foreign Plants— Japanese Larch. 



A Dumfriesshire proprietor states that for the past three years 

 he has got all his young forest plants. from France. They are sent 

 over in March, and are at once put into the nursery, and they are 

 planted out in the following autumn. All the plants thus received 

 have done well, with the exception of the Scots fir, which he 

 thinks suffers from frost moi-e than the native plants. The hard- 

 woods—oak, sycamore, and poplar — have done excellently, he says. 



With regard to pine, he mentions that some plants were put in 

 about twenty-five years ago on a shallow soil, and they have been 

 blown down to a greater extent than spruce planted under the 

 same circumstances. He has also tried Japanese larch, and 

 mentions that he put in five hundred two-year-old plants last 

 year, in shallow soil with a southern exposure. The roe deer ate 



