CHAP, xvn SYLVA 141 



ance, whether the place be high, or low, and nothing 

 comes amiss to it. Plant the small twigs, or suckers 

 having roots, and after the first year, cut them within 

 an inch of the surface ; this will cause them to sprout 

 in strong and lusty tufts, fit for copp'ce, and spring- 

 woods ; or, by reducing them to one stem, render 

 them in a very few years fit for the turner. For 



2. Though birch be of all other the worst of tim- 

 ber, yet has it its various uses, as for the husbandman's 

 ox-yoaks ; also for hoops, small screws, paniers, 

 brooms, wands, bavin-bands, and wythes for fagots ; 

 and claims a memory for arrows, bolts, shafts, (our 

 old English artillery ;) also for dishes, bowls, ladles, 

 and other domestic utensils, in the good old days of 

 more simplicity, yet of better and truer hospitality. 

 In New-England our Northern Americans make can- 

 oos, boxes, buckets, kettles, dishes, which they sow, 

 and joyn very curiously with thread made of cedar- 

 roots, and divers other domestical utensils, as baskets, 

 baggs, with this tree, whereof they have a blacker 

 kind ; and out of a certain excrescence from the bole, 

 zjungus, which being boil'd, beaten, and dry'd in an 

 oven, makes excellent spunck or touch-wood, and 

 balls to play withal ; and being reduc'd to powder, 

 astringent, is an infallible remedy in the hcemerhoids. 

 They make also not only this small ware, but even 

 small-craft, pinnaces of birch, ribbing them with 

 white cedar, and covering them with large flakes of 

 birch-bark, sow them with thread of spruse-roots, 

 and pitch them, as it seems we did even here in 

 Britain, as well as the Veneti, making use of the 

 willow, whereof Lucan, 



