724 APPENDIX. 



By the word 'abietem' Julius meant probably the Abies pectinata, 

 s. Pinus picea L., our ( silver fir/ a tree with which, as being a 

 Swiss, a French, and a Pyrenean pine, and climbing those heights 

 in company with the beech, his campaigns in Western Europe had 

 sufficiently familiarised him. The Scotch fir, Pinus sylvestris, was 

 for many centuries later the only representative in these islands of 

 the Abietinea, and indeed the yew, Taxus laccata, and the juniper, 

 Juniperus communis, the only other representatives of the entire 

 natural order Coniferte 1 . 



In a round barrow at Kepwick examined by Canon Greenwell 

 (see supra p. 337) and myself the grave was found lined with the 

 bark and branches of the birch ; much as the Lapp graves, described 

 in the Compte Rendu of the Stockholm International Congress of 

 Anthropology, 1876, torn. i. p. 181, or Mestorf's Report of it, 

 1874, p. 13, contained bodies entirely covered with several layers of 

 birch bark sewed round them to protect them as much as possible. 

 It is interesting to add that in these tombs, constructed of stones 

 and with much pains, ' on y a retrouve . . . des pointes de fleche 

 et des cuillers en bois de renne ainsi que des fragments de poterie 

 . . . .' and that t quelques-uns de tombeaux renfermaient une ou 

 deux pieces de bronze et de fer.' 



Herr Victor Hehn has in two passages, I.e. pp. 11 and 425, laid 

 so much weight upon the importance of the lime or linden tree (the 

 * lyndes faire ' of Chaucer, Tilia europcea, grandifolia^ andparmfolia of 

 botanists) to man in early stages of culture, at once for the manufacture 

 of matting, an invention of older date than weaving, and for the 



1 The Scotch fir, P. sylvestris, must have met Caesar's eyes in great abundance in 

 the parts of Britain which he traversed. Still he, not being a botanist, may have 

 failed to recognise it as an abies ; and it may, in the other countries in which he 

 might have seen it, have been, then as now, overgrown and obscured by its natural 

 allies. Or indeed it may have been represented in those regions at that time only by 

 that dwarf marsh-haunting variety which, following zoological analogies, I would 

 call P. sylvestris, var. palustris. The Swiss spruce, -P. abies, on the other hand, 

 which as much excels our English spruce in size and beauty as our Scotch fir excels 

 the Swiss, may very easily have been confounded with the silver fir, P. picea, by 

 Caesar, as when old it comes to resemble it both in general fades and in the colour 

 of its bark. I have thought that the spruce may, like our common elm, have 

 attained its present numerical preponderance in recent times and owing to man's 

 help and its superior serviceability. And Dr. Uhlmann tells me it is less abundantly 

 represented in the stone-period lake-dwelling of Miinchenbuchsee than the silver fir. 

 Dr. H. Christ, on the other hand, says the reverse is the case in the station of Roben- 

 hausen, which, according to Rutimeyer, Fauna der Pfahlbauten, p. 161, bears other 

 evidence of belonging to a later * Kulturzustand.' For the geographical distribution 

 of the Abietinece, see De Candolle, I. c., pp. 158, 190, 192 ; Fischer, Flora von Bern, 

 1863, pp. 227, 228; Heer in Keller, ed. Lee, p. 349; Dr. Christ in Rutimeyer, 

 I. c., pp. 228, 229. 



