PKODUCED BY MAN. 785 



whilst mentioning (1. c. p. 293) Bremontier, couples witli his name 

 that of M. Desbiiy, but adds that the greatest credit of all is due 

 to M. Ivry, of Bordeaux, whom he visited himself in 1864, on his 

 own plantations at Pian, and found to be still a vigorous man 

 though eighty-six years of age. Professor Koch pays a meed of 

 praise to the late Emperor Louis Napoleon for his exertions in the 

 same direction and locality; and it is, I think, to another name 

 connected with the Second Empire that the credit is, rightly or 

 wrongly \ assigned, of having enabled the wastes of Gascony to 

 produce and to boast of the heterogeneous multitude of useful pro- 

 ducts displayed in our industrial exhibitions as being now manu- 

 factured out of the pine imported thither from Corsica. 



It is in this same many-sided connection interesting to note, 

 if we in these recent centuries have re-introduced several . conifers 

 which were indigenous, like the spruce, in the immediately pre- 

 glacial, or like the silver fir, in the still later period of the deposi- 

 tion of the peatj but perished either before or during the pre-historic 

 human period ^, and if we are still actively employed in adding to 

 the number of species of this natural order in our landscape by 

 importation from every quarter of the globe, from China to Chili, 

 in proportions represented by a descriptive catalogue of more than 

 400 ' plants of the fir tribe suitable for the climate of the United 

 Kingdom,' we have, I think it may be shown, also considerably 

 diminished the numbers of one of the few of our native repre- 

 sentatives of this order. This is the yew (Taosus baccata). It is 

 a tree which, though valuable to the turner, nevertheless grows too 

 slowly to pay well in these days when the spirit which makes 

 haste to be rich makes a 'vegetable manufactory' of the hill-sides 

 of our Lake District (to use Wordsworth's prose), by covering 

 them with the rapidly growing larch — to say nothing of the 

 severe competition, even as a wood for the turner, to which the 

 beautiful woods of New Zealand and other southern colonies now 

 subject it. Formerly matters stood somewhat differently, when it 

 could be said : — 



* England were but a fling 

 But for the eugh and the gray goose wing.' 



1 Wrongly very likely — in England we are content to ascribe the invention of the 

 safety lamp to George Stephenson. 



'^ See De Candolle, * Geogr. Botan.' 807. 



3B 



