50 Short Papers and Notes. 
cohort of social regenerators, men of high aims, and for whom he 
had great respect, who would hand over science and scientific men 
to a hierarchy which would determine the particular subjects that 
the scientific man ought to pursue. Where that hierarchy was to 
get its wisdom, they never explained. ‘Those writers denounced 
and scorned all reference to what they considered to lie apart from 
human needs, and yet upon sensible conceptions—as of molecules, 
for instance—sometimes depended the greatest discoveries. 
When the feeble magneto-electric spark was first introduced, an 
Oxford don expressed his great regret that such a discovery 
should have been made, for, he said, it put a new and facile 
instrument in the hands of the incendiary! Let them imagine 
that hierarchy of which he had spoken watching Faraday peddling 
over his magnets. They would certainly have sent him back to 
the bookbinder’s bench as a far more dignified occupation. Yet 
it was Faraday’s spark that now shone, and which he hoped would 
illuminate our quays and halls, and esplanades and squares, and 
possibly also our homes. 
The Spruce Fir. 
The species is widely distributed both in latitude and longitude 
—more so, in fact, than many of its allies, being indigenous alike 
in the Kurile Islands and Siberia as in Norway, and from the 
Swiss Alps to beyond the Arctic Circle. Though in its extreme 
northern area it seldom occurs at an altitude of more than 750 
feet above sea-level, in the south of Norway it reaches more than 
3,000 feet, at the same time descending the shores of some of the 
fjords down to the water’s edge. It is, in fact, the prevalent tree 
of the basin of the Baltic, and Loudon states that the finest 
spruce forests which he had seen were between Memel and 
Konigsberg, growing in peaty soil, resting on sand, and liable to 
inundation during a great part of every winter. It is, in fact, 
owing to its requirement, for its successful cultivation as a timber- 
tree, of soil that in England or Scotland can be profitably culti- 
vated for agricultural crops, that the spruce has not been so exten- 
sively planted as the Pine and the Larch, which flourish in drier 
and more barren soils. The wood of the spruce is generally 
white, more elastic, less resinous, and consequently lighter, than 
that of the Scotch pine. When grown in the open, where large 
branches may be broken off, it is apt to be very knotty; but in 
denser forests, where it is drawn up, it is fine and even in grain. 
It has been largely imported into England from Norway “in the 
round,” for masts, spars, scaffolding, and ladders. These are, 
however, the smaller trees, imported with the bark on. The 
larger trees are sawn up, and are known as White Baltic, Norway, 
