THE COMMON LARCH. 499 



will yield seven or eight pounds of turpentine every sea- 

 son for forty or fifty years in succession. The wood of 

 trees, we may observe, from which the turpentine has been 

 long extracted, is of no use for building purposes, and even 

 the charcoal made from it is inferior to that made from the 

 Larch undeprived of its resin. The manna of Briangon, 

 so called from its being collected and produced in greater 

 quantity in that country than in any other, is found in the 

 form of small white glutinous grains, supposed by some to 

 be an exudation from the bark of the young shoots, by 

 others of the buds and leaves, though to us it seems more 

 likely to be the product of an insect ; in its appearance, 

 and properties, it bears some resemblance to the manna 

 of the flowering ash, — Fraxinus omus. 



In Britain, though the Larch as we have seen, was 

 first planted with a view to profit, or as a timber-tree only 

 about seventy or eighty years ago, the rapidity of its 

 growth, and the quality of its wood, which was found, 

 even when cut at a very early age, to be superior in every 

 respect to that of the evergreen Firs, soon brought it into 

 notice and use, and it is now, after further trial, univer- 

 sally considered and admitted to be not only the most 

 profitable tree to plant, but to produce timber applicable 

 to a greater variety of purposes, and possessing proper- 

 ties superior to those of the most valued deciduous forest 

 trees, rivalling even the oak in its adaptation to the im- 

 portant purpose of ship-building, in which it is now largely 

 employed. In Scotland and the north of England it is 

 also daily coming into more extensive use, and is rapidly 

 taking the place of other woods, such as those of the 

 ash, and wych-elm, even in the manufacture of articles 

 and implements for which the timber of these trees was 

 previously considered almost indispensable, but which when 



