ORIGIN OF NAMES ABIES AND PICEA 107 



height, and the Spruce that provided the pix 

 liquida, the boiling liquid pitch, that was — but is 

 not now — employed for purposes of torture in the 

 days of the early Roman Empire. 



In the long-ago past of pre-Virgilian days maybe 

 there was some cause for confusion as to whether 

 the word Abies referred to Silver Fir, or whether 

 Picea stood for a Spruce, or whether, vice versa, a 

 Spruce was an Abies and a Silver Fir a Picea. This 

 difference seems to have developed into quite a 

 long-standing cause celebre in the courts of botanical 

 jurisprudence. As a contest of wits it was a case 

 of a lead-off between two no less renowned Romans 

 than Pliny called the Elder on the one side, and 

 Virgilius Maro of Georgic fame on the other. In the 

 courts of appeal the verdict has gone in favour of 

 Virgil, and from our point of view rightly. Virgil 

 was born and lived on his parental farm, while Pliny 

 led the life of a soldier and barrister-at-law in turn. 

 Virgil lived a generation before Pliny and so was first 

 in the field, not only agriculturally speaking, but 

 from a previous generation point of view, if that goes 

 for anything, at a date when the laudator iemporis 

 acti is apt to be quoted at a discount. One more 

 word in favour of this judgment : either the author 

 of the Georgics was an authority on country life, or 

 vast sums of parental money have been from time 

 immemorial thrown away on the public schools' 

 curriculum in England. From an extract in his oft- 

 construed epic poem, the ^neid, it has been shown 

 {v. Veitch's Book of Conifers) that he referred to the 

 existence of Abies growing in a locality in which 

 Silver Firs have always been known to flourish, and 

 where Spruces — it is equally well known — have 

 never seen the light of day, or still less those heights 

 in the heavens that so many of the Abies reach. 

 If this is not conclusive reasoning that the Silver 



