278 STUDIES IN INSECT LIFE, ETC. 



find other composts to ameliorate our ground." 

 His well-known " Sylva," published in 1664, had 

 an immediate and a widespread effect, and was, for 

 many years, the standard book on the subject 

 of the culture of trees. It is held to be responsible 

 for a great outbreak of tree-planting. The intro- 

 duction to Nisbet's edition gives figures which 

 demonstrate the shortage in the available supply 

 of oak timber during the seventeenth century. 

 The charm of Evelyn's style and the practical 

 nature of his book, which ran into four editions 

 before the author's death, arrested this decline 

 (" be aye sticking in a tree ; it will be growing, 

 Jock, when y're sleeping " as the laird of Dumbie- 

 dykes counselled his son), and to the " Sylva " of 

 John Evelyn is largely due the fact that the oak 

 timber used for the British ships which fought 

 the French in the eighteenth century sufficed, 

 but barely sufficed, for the national needs. 



Pepys, whose naive and frank self-revelations 

 have made him the most popular and the most 

 frequently read of diarists, was not quite of the 

 same class of student to which Lord Herbert of 

 Cherbury or John Evelyn belonged. But, gifted 

 as he was with an undying and insatiable curiosity, 

 nothing was too trivial or too odd for his notice 



