312 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY 
humble efforts can more generally impress this view, I shall gladly 
underlie the charge of iteration and reiteration. 
To take a country with whose flora we are all more or less 
familiar, and which well illustrates my meaning, I append a rough 
Forest Chart of Switzerland. Here we have certain trees occupying 
with tolerable exclusiveness well-defined regions of the same 
country, while that country itself divides the distinctive flora 
of Northern Europe from the distinctive flora of Southern 
Europe. Such a map, of course more accurately prepared, should 
accompany every exhibition of wood specimens, explanatory 
tables being appended to show the number of trees of each sort, 
mature and maturing, which are or will become available in given 
years. We have further at a glance the position of the woods with 
reference to their accessibility, and the means available, whether by 
road or by water, for the transport of their products to an inland or 
sea-coast market. I should like to see such maps illustrating all the 
portions of the British empire, and I may perhaps be permitted to 
add that I should like to see such a map in an early volume of the 
Society’s Zransactions, which would do this good office for Scotland, 
which, so far as forestry is concerned, is facile princeps amongst 
its own immediate neighbours. 
PREPARATION OF Woop SPECIMENS. 
In regard to the size and shape of the wood specimens, of course 
tastes are various, quot homines, tot sententie. We have little bricks 
of wood carefully polished, and we have the rough unhewn product 
of the virgin jungle. Both have their 
values, and both have certainly their 
disadvantages, the latter to my mind 
preponderating. Looking to the 
objects I have noted above as apply- 
ing generally, [ would venture to limit 
the preparation of actual specimens 
to two classes with regard to their 
ultimate destinations, z.e., the museum 
of the botanist, or the timber-yard of 
the importer. Neither of these should, I think, be small. 
For scientific purposes I might admit, in deference to the opinion 
of others, those specimens made in book form (Fig. 1). Here the 
size should be not less than 12 inches by 12 by 3 inches, the bark 
Fig. 1. 
