146 Gardening in the United States. 



to conviction. We should differ from one another whenever in 

 our power, not from the love of contention, but to endeavour to 

 establish truth. 



The second Part is a masterpiece of condensed reasoning on 

 chemical transformations, showing the difficulties attending on 

 attempts to arrive at a correct analysis of organic substances, 

 from their compound complicated nature; the necessity of ni- 

 trogen in the nature of the yeast formed in all fermentation, also 

 the difference between fermentation and putrefaction ; the dif- 

 ference between eremacausis requiring a constant supply of 

 oxgyen, and putrefaction which does not; the nature of the 

 vinous fermentation, showing the best means of preserving the 

 greatest quantity of alcohol, the strength of beer and wine, by 

 the degree of temperature, &c., maintained ; the nature of the 

 decay of woody fibre and mouldering bodies, pointing out the 

 results that taku place ; the nature of poisons, contagion, and 

 miasms, and their mode of action. The subject is itself con- 

 densed, and a proper idea of it can only be got from the work : 

 it is interesting and important to many descriptions of persons 

 besides the cultivators of the soil. 



Kilmarnock, Jan. 23. 1841. 



Art. II. Additional Notes on the Progress of Gardening in the 

 United States. By A. J. Downing, Esq. 



In my notes to you on the progress of gardening in the United 

 States (Vol. for 1840, p. 642.), I accidentally omitted any 

 allusion to the taste for cemeteries or rural burial-grounds 

 which has lately sprung up among us. Some of these are ex- 

 ceedingly beautiful, displaying much of the beauty of landscape- 

 gardening in the natural style. Mount Auburn, near Boston, 

 is one of the finest examples, and has been pronounced by good 

 judges superior in many respects to the celebrated Pere la Chaise. 

 The area embraced is about seventy acres, and its characteristic 

 beauty consists in the very great natural variety of the surface, 

 clothed with a profusion of fine trees of indigenous growth. 

 Open smooth glades are followed by shady and secluded dingles, 

 and these by wild and picturesque hills, all so rapidly presenting 

 themselves in succession, and so ingeniously displayed by wind- 

 ing and irregular carriage roads and footpaths, that the whole 

 appears two or three times as large as it really is. There are a 

 great number of elegant monuments in marble and granite, in the 

 form of columns, obelisks, sarcophagi, &c., some of them 

 highly elegant, and a few imported from Italy at very large cost. 

 Portions of the place exhibit all the floral beauty of highly kept 

 pleasvu'e-grounds, while other parts have all the wildness of rude 

 nature. It is a favourite resort of the citizens of Boston, and 



