Dy alae es ie 
8 onthe value and uses of the larch tree. Sept. 4. 
to time, but the larch is still sound. They employ 
this wood at present in Provence, for making cafks. 
The chesnut of the Cevennes had supplied the place 
of the oak, and the larch now succefsfully supplies 
that of the chesnut. The finenefs of the grain re- 
tains perfectly the spirit of the liquor, and does not 
alter its quality. It has been employed for that use 
for time immemorial in the higher Dauphiné, from 
Sisteron even to Briancot. I have in my castle of | 
Tour d’Aigues, beams of twenty inches square, 
which are sound, though upwards of two hundred 
years old ; but trees of this size are now only to be 
found in places whence they cannot be transported. 
There are in some parts of Dauphiné, and in the fo- 
rest of Baye in Provence, larch trees which two men 
could not grasp, and more than twelve toises, (about 
seventy-five feet) in height.” Mem. R. Soc. Agri. 
Paris, 1787. 
Tt is not in France alone that this peculiarity has 
bgen observed. Dr Pallas, in the extensive travels 
he made throughout the Rufsian dominions, took no- 
tice of a kind of tumuli which were frequent in 
Kamtchatka, which were said to be the burying 
places of their ancestors, of immemorial antiquity. 
He caused some of them to be opened, to observe 
their contents, and found in the centre of each, the 
remains of one or more human bodies, whith had 
been deposited under something that had the appedr- 
ance of a roof, consisting of beams of larch wood, 
placed so as to join together at top, and spread wide 
below. These had geen afterwards covered to 4 
great height with a large mound of earth, which 
