214 LITERATURE OF SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURE. 



ideas of pleasure or scenes of blissful delight were desired to be 

 conveyed to the mind of the reader. Virgil, moreover, enumerates 

 the various ways of propagating trees and shrubs, both natural and 

 artificial (Geor. ii. 9), common in his time; and we find, upon a 

 close survey of the writings of the old classical authors, that the 

 usages in vogue in those days for the cultivation of timber trees and 

 shrubs were much the same as we now insist upon at the present 

 time. Propagation by seeds, layers, suckers, " sets," slips or cuttings, 

 grafting, budding, or "inoculation" (Plin. xvii. 16, s. 26), were all 

 well known and practised very extensively. Forest trees were 

 chiefly grown from seeds. The practice of cutting over coppice to 

 sprout again from the stool (succisce repullulant) was quite common 

 (Plin. xii. 19). "We have also reference made by Pliny to the exist- 

 ence of a trunk of larix or larch, 120 feet in length, and 2 feet in 

 thickness (Plin. xvi. 40, s. 74). The art of transplanting trees also 

 received due attention, and indeed seems to have been carried 

 on (as many other forest operations were) with careful regard to 

 physiological principles. Thus, for example, we find that in re- 

 moving trees from one site to another, the Romans marked 

 upon the bark the way each tree stood prior to removal, so that it 

 might, in its new situation, point to exactly the same quarter of the 

 heavens.* 



These, and other authorities and facts which might easily be cited, 

 show us how far advanced in the science of arboriculture were the 

 Romans at the time of their invasion of Britain, and we may easily 

 conceive the intelligent observation they would bring to bear 

 upon the woods of the new country they wished to conquer, and the 

 knowledge they would impart to the untutored savage inhabitants 

 of these islands regarding this and other kindred departments of rural 

 matters. 



Cradled thus in its infancy among the literati and philosophy of 

 classic Greece and Rome, extolled in praise by bard, philosopher, 

 and historian — the greatest writers of that golden age of early litera- 

 ture, — need we wonder that arboriculture, and a practical love for 

 trees and shrubs, nourished and grew apace in that distant era of 

 the world's history % Nor were the nostrums and principles of rural 

 economy and tree culture simply confined to the writings and 

 theories of these grand old masters of style and rhetoric, for many 

 of them wrote and spoke from intimate personal acquaintance in a 

 practical form with the subjects they described, and whose praises 

 * Virgil, Geor. ii. 269. Col. de Arbor., 17, 4. 



