202 Select: Plants for Industrial Culture and 



gluten 8*16, starch 1*45, gum 2'14, sugar 5'05 per cent. [F. v, 

 Mueller and L. Hummel]. F. duriuscula mainly sustains millions 

 of sheep in the upper regions of New Zealand [D. Petrie]. 



Festuca purpurea, F. v. Mueller. (Urahpis purpurea, Nuttal; Tricuspis 

 purpurea, A. Gray. 



South-E astern coast of North- America. A tufty sand-grass, but 

 annual. 



Festuca silvatica, Yillars. 



Middle and Southern Europe. A notable forest-grass. F. dry- 

 meia (Mertens and Koch), a grass with long creeping roots, is 

 closely allied. Both deserve test-culture. Space does not admit 

 of entering here into further details of the respective values of 

 many species of Festuca, which might advantageously be intro- 

 duced from various parts of the globe for rural purposes. 



FiCUS Beng-halensis, Linne. (F. Indica, Linne partly.) 



The Banyan-tree of India, famed for its enormous expansion and 

 air-roots. Height to 100 feet. Although not strictly an utilitarian 

 tree, it is admitted here as one of the most shady trees, adapted for 

 warm and moist regions. At the age of 100 years one individual 

 tree will shade and occupy about one and a half acre, and rest on 

 150 stems or more, the mainstems often with a circumference of 50 

 feet, the secondary stems with a diameter of several feet. At Mel- 

 bourne the tree suffers somewhat from the night-frosts. 



Ficus Carica, Linne.* 



The ordinary Fig-tree. Alpli. de Candolle speaks of it as spon- 

 taneous from Syria to the Canary-Islands ; Count Solms-Laubach 

 confines the nativity of the Fig-tree to the countries on the Persian 

 Gulf. It attains an age of several hundred years. In warm tem- 

 perate latitudes and climes a prolific tree. The most useful and at 

 the same time the most hardy of half a thousand recorded species 

 of Ficus. The extreme facility with which it can be propagated 

 from cuttings, the resistance to heat, the comparatively early yield 

 and easy culture recommend the Fig-tree, where it is an object to 

 raise masses of tree-vegetation in widely treeless lands of the 

 warmer zones for shade and fruit. Hence the extensive plantations 

 of this tree made in formerly woodless parts of Egypt ; hence the 

 likelihood of choosing the Fig as one of the trees for extensive 

 planting through favorable portions of desert- waste, where more- 

 over the fruit could be dried with particular ease. Small cuttings 

 went quite well, chiefly by horse-post, from Port Phillip to the 

 central Australian Mission-stations, a distance as far as from Peters- 

 burg to the Black Sea, or from Bombay to Thibet, or from Cape- 

 town to Lake Ngami, or from San Francisco to the Upper Missouri. 

 Maintained its high reputation there as a drought-resisting tree 

 during the worst seasons, and grew best of all fruit-trees. Fig-trees 



