CLASS XXI. ORDER VII. | BETULA. 1219 
pounds of sugar; it is then fermented with yeast in the usual way. 
To every gullon of the clear liquor some people add the juice and 
rind of a lemon, and the rind of a Seville orange, and occasionally 
also is put into the cask after it is tunned a little cinnamon or other 
aromatic. It requires being kept three months in the cask before it 
is bottled, and twelve months or more before it is drank. It is a 
wholesome wine, with an agreeable flavour, and if carefully made 
is effervescent like champagne. 
The Birch tree gives food to more insects perhaps than any other 
of our native trees, and upon its bark several curious Fungi grow, as 
well as Lichens. 
“* Sweet bird of the meadow, soft be thy rest, 
Thy mother will wake thee at morn frum thy nest, 
She has made a soft nest little redbreast for thee, 
Of the leaves of the birch, and the moss of the tree.’ 
Leyden. 
In America the “ Canoe Birch” (B. papyracea) is so called from 
the bark being used for making canoes ; these vessels are so light 
that one large enough to hold four persons does not weigh more than 
fifty pounds. It was the inner bark of this as well as other species on 
which the ancients wrote, before the invention of paper making and 
printing. 
2. B. na'na, Linn. (Fig. 1469.) Dwarf Birch. Leaves sub- 
orbicular, crenate. 
English Botany, t 2326.—English Flora, vol. iv. p. 154.—Hooker, 
British Flora, ed. 4. vol. i. p. 349.—Lindley, Synopsis, p. 229. 
A bushy shrub, two or three feet high, much branched, downy 
when young. JZeaves numerous, small, petiolated, nearly orbicular, 
smooth, beautifully netted with pale veins, especially beneath, the 
margin crenated, with roundish obtuse teeth. Stipules two, brown, 
lanceolate, membranous. Barren flowers in erect cylindrical short 
catkins. Fertile catkins ovate, brown, erect, terminal, its scales three 
lobed, three flowered. Stigmas two, awl-shaped, pink. Fruit 
roundish, obovate, with two membranous wings. 
Habitat.—Highlands of Scotland; rare in the Lowlands. 
Shrub ; flowering in May. 
This humble shrub is almost the only one the poor Laplanders 
meet with in some parts of their country, and it constitutes their fuel 
for cooking, and serves various other purposes, besides that of making 
their beds, along with a rein-deer’s skin for a covering. It is fre- 
quently mentioned by Linnzus in his Lapland tour. 
