Botany. 261 
ten in Fryeburg called “ The Village,” the following lines are 
bestowed upon it. 
“¢ More sacred than the thunder chosen oak, 
«* Let not the maple feel the woodman’s stroke. 
« Fair maple! honours purer far are thine 
“Than Venus’s myrtle yields, or Bacchus’s vine ; 
‘* Minerva’s olive, consecrated tree, 
** Deserves not half the homage due to thee. 
“ The queen of trees, thou proudly tower’st on high, 
“ Yet wave thy limbs in graceful pliancy.”’ 
The wood of this tree is light and soft. The sap-wood 
is very white and has been used by cabinet makers to inlay 
their work. The heart-wood is a light mahogany colour 
generally variegated with dark streaks. ‘The wood, and es- 
pecially the bark gives a black colour with the salts of iron. 
In many places thread and other stuffs are coloured black 
with a decoction of the bark of this as well as that of the 
red maple, and ink is made of it. 
In the first volume of Tilloch’s magazine is an account of 
the manufacture of sugar from the sugar maple in the mid- 
dle states by the late Dr. Rush of Philadelphia, from which 
the following particulars are abstracted. 
1. One tree yields from twenty to thirty gallons of sap in 
a season, which will make from five to six pounds of sugar, 
and in a single instance twenty pounds were made from one 
tree 1n a season. 
2. One man made six hundred and forty pounds in four 
weeks. 
3. A man and his two sons made eighteen hundred 
pounds in a season. 
4, That the tree improves by tapping, affording more 
and better sap.* 
5. The sugar is of a better quality than West-India sugar. 
6. A farmer in North-Hampton county (Penn.) improv- 
ed the quality of the maple sap by culture, so that he ob- 
* According to my observations the sap improves in quality but is much 
diminished in quantity. L. 
Vou. ..;..No. 2. 34 
