PEODUCED BY MAN. 779 



climate of the United Kingdom, cultivated by ... . nurserymen 

 and seed merchants,' fill up some sixty- six pages in a sale catalogue 

 now before me. Any traveller, by rail or otherwise, can appre- 

 ciate the greatness of the alteration which has been effected by 

 man on nature, if he will but bear in mind the three trees just 

 specified, and recollect as he sees the silver fir spreading out with its 

 airy interspaces in the sky-line, and the larches and spruces clothing 

 the hill-side in acres upon acres, that these trees were as little 

 known to the untravelled Englishman of the times of the Tudors 

 as were the ' Weymouth ' pine, the Deodara, the Wellingtonia, or 

 the Araucariae. The statesman, indeed, can read something of the 

 political and commercial history of this kingdom in the trees which 

 speak of the various countries, farther distant apart from each 

 other than are ' China and Peru,' with which England has succes- 

 sively come into rapport ; and the changes which he has suggested 

 to him are scarcely, if at all, less complicated than those which the 

 naturalist can show to have been similarly set up in the world of 

 lower life represented by birds and insects. Since I wrote as 

 above (1. c) I became acquainted with an article on ' Coniferous 

 Trees ' in the October number of the ' Edinburgh Review ' for 

 1864, to which I would beg to refer my hearers for a detailed 

 and very interesting account of the successive successful acclimati- 

 sations of members of this natural order ; and upon the ground 

 thus sufficiently occupied I will not encroach. It is not un- 

 interesting, and not entirely irrelevant either, to observe that Great 

 Britain and Ireland were both richer in Coniferae in recent geolo- 

 gical periods than they have been since those times down to those 

 of the Stuarts. In the sunken forest at Cromer, in Norfolk, in a 

 deposit 1 of a period immediately preceding the glacial, we find 

 the spruce fir represented, together with nearly all the rest of the 

 scanty list of really indigenous post-glacial English trees. In the 

 Cromer forest we find the spruce represented, together with the 

 Scotch fir, the yew, the oak, the elder, the birch, and the black- 

 thorn. The ash has somehow failed to join itself on to this com- 

 pany; but we see it forming one of it, though the spruce in its 

 turn is absent as well as all other trees, in many small copses or 

 thickets in out-of-the-way parts of this country. Such, for example, 

 are many mountain-lime-stone headlands in parts of the Principality, 

 1 See ' Rudiments of Geology,' by Samuel Sharp, r.s.A., F.Q.S. 2nded. 1876, p. 169. 



