84 THE BIBCH AND THE ALDER. 



catkins. Many trees give notice thus long beforehand of the activity 

 contemplated for the year to follow, but it is in the alder alone that we 

 have all these seasons, the past, the present, and the future, so beauti- 

 fully associated. The phenomenon is one of so much the more 

 interest from its reminding us once again how far back lie the begin- 

 nings of things ! In April we say, behold the spring ! But the alder 

 was on the alert in March, in February, at Christmas ! yea, long back 

 in the old year, while the farewell -summer was in blossom, and the nuts 

 were barely ripe ! It forms a beautiful picture of the incessant recur- 

 rence of life upon death ; before the aged have departed, the young 

 are rising up to take their places. 



The uses of the alder are not confined to its landscape effects and its 

 significance. The leaves afford a brown dye, indicated by" their rapidly 

 changing to this colour when laid between papers to dry for the herb- 

 arium ; and if we are tp believe Virgil, it was of the wood that mankind 

 constructed the first ships ; at all events the first record of ship-building, 

 after the time of Noah's ark, is that well-known line 



Tune alnos primum fluvii sensere cavatas. 



The alder is mentioned also by Homer, under the name of clethra (now 

 applied to the fragrant flowering-shrub mentioned above), but apparently 

 not elsewhere. The wood has the valuable property of resisting the 

 action of water, whence it is of great commercial value for the construc- 

 tion of piles for bridges, &c., as in the celebrated arch of the Rialto at 

 Venice, which is said to owe its stability to the use of this alone. In 

 France, great numbers of the wooden shoes there called "sabots" are 

 also manufactured from the wood of the alder. In stature this tree 

 rises to the height of fifty or sixty feet ; in profile, when well grown, 

 it is broad-headed, and somewhat oak-like. 



