54 VEGETABLE SUBSTANCES. 



and public buildings of Venice being said to be one 

 hundred and twenty feet long. Even in the planta- 

 tions of the Duke of Athol, and other proprietors in 

 Perthshire, some larches are at least one hundred feet 

 high. The wild alternation of hill and valley in that 

 county, with the general opening of the glens and 

 exposure of the surface to the south, seem to afford 

 the larch a situation something like its native locality 

 in the Tyrolese and Dalmatian Alps: for though 

 other trees, and some of them fast growing ones, 

 such as the spruce, have been planted at the same 

 time, the larch overtops them all; and in summer, 

 when it is in the full luxuriance of its leaves, 

 (which are a bright clover green,) it rises over the 

 dark forest like an obelisk of beryl. The larch sheds 

 its leaves, and is probably by that means saved from 

 those keen blasts of the very early spring that prove 

 destructive to pines. Even when naked it is an orna- 

 mental tree. The trunk is generally straight, taper- 

 ing gradually to a point; the branches, which are 

 rather small in proportion to the tree, taper up in the 

 form of a perfect cone ; and the whole is of a lively 

 brown, streaked with a golden colour. 



A few larches are said to have been introduced 

 into this country in the early part of the seventeenth 

 century, as rarities; but it only began to be cultivated 

 as a forest-tree about the middle of the eighteenth 

 century. Since that time it has been extensively 

 planted, more especially in Scotland; and the success 

 has been far greater, and far more uniform, than in 

 the case of any other tree, not a native of the country. 

 It appears that the quality of larch timber does not 

 depend so much upon the maturity of the tree, and 

 the slowness of its growth, as that of the pine, as 

 a fishing boat, built of larch only forty years old, 

 has been found to last three times as long as one ot 

 the best Norway pine. It is not so buoyant, how 



