518 [Assembly 



Wheu these vegetables are to be used, all that is uecessary is to 

 steep tlieui for forty-five minutes to one hour in warm water, then 

 boil as long as we do fresh vegetables, and they swell gradually 

 and resume their size nearly and the pliability which they had 

 when first gathered from the soil. The boiling takes an hour 

 and-a-half to two hours. Various committees from the Navy, 

 the Academy of Sciences, the National and Central Society of 

 Agriculture and your Society have proved the good alimentary 

 qualities of these cured vegetables, particularly various sorts of 

 cabbages, celery, spinach and others, all so necessary for the 

 health of sailors on long voyages. 



In flue, it seems to us beyond a doubt that medicinal and aro- 

 matic plants, selected in their own countries where their useful 

 properties are most developed and their cultivation least costly, 

 may be most advantageously preserved in this way for quality, 

 space, for the use of all, especially armies, navy, hospital. All 

 these consequences of Masson's invention have been highly appre- 

 ciated at the Universal Exhibition in London. Your council has 

 decreed to him the gold medal of the Minister of Agriculture 

 and Commerce. 



Meigs on Anciekt Trees. — Modern investigation of coal and lig- 

 nite strata has proved the existence of trees of the same orders as 

 those now existing. In the Brown coal strata are found coniferae 

 and other trees of considerable magnitude growing among the 

 famous palms, ferns and cycadese of the old world. At Bonn, 

 on the Rhine, in a bed of lignite, or brown coal, Noggerath ex- 

 amined a tree the rings of which were seven hundred and nine- 

 ty-two; and at Somme, near Abbeville, in the north of France, 

 oaks have been found in a turf-raoor, which are fourteen feet in 

 diameter — a very remarkable growth out of the tropics. These 

 huge ancient trees are few, so are our modern large trees such as 

 the Baobab, the red pine of California and the gum of Australia. 

 Lindley believes our modern trees to be probably (some of them) 

 four thousand years of age. If, as we may believe, the old trees 

 Tfere laid before our moderns began, then we have testimony by 

 their rings ol some seven or sight thousand years from the begin- 

 mg ot their growth. 



