148 FOBESt OtTLTUBE A^t) 



ries. A kind of Jute (Corchorus olitorius) succeeds 

 as far north as the Mediterranean, and grows wild 

 with the Sun Hemp ( Crotalaria juncea) in tropical 

 Australia; the latter plant comes naturally almost 

 to the boundaries of our colony. A Melbourne rope- 

 factory offers £36 for the ton of New Zealand Flax, 

 and can consume six tons per week. Hemp, used 

 since antiquity, produces, along with its fibre, the 

 Hypnotic Churras. England imported, in 1858, 

 Hemp, to the value of more than £1,000,000.* This 

 may suffice to indicate new resources in this direction. 

 For Sumach our country offers, in many places, the 

 precise conditions for its successful growth, as con- 

 firmed by actual tests. Tannic substances, of which 

 the indigenous supply is abundant and manifold, 

 would assume still greater commercial importance by 

 simple processes of reducing them to a concentrated 

 form. How on any forest river might not the Fil- 

 bert-tree be naturalized ; on precipitous places, among 

 rocks, it would form a useful jungle, furnishing, be- 

 sides, its nuts, the material for fishing-rods, hoops, 

 charcoal crayons, and other purposes. From a single 

 forest at Barcelona sixty thousand bushels are obtain- 

 ed in a year. (For these and many other data brought 

 before you in this lecture you may refer further, most 

 conveniently, to a posthumous work of the great Pro- 

 fessor Lindley, Treasury of Botany, edited by Mr. 

 Th. Moore, with the aid of able contributors.) Even 

 the Loquat would attain in our forest glens the size 

 of a fair, or even large tree. 



* The import of Hemp and Jute into Brit&in during 1868 was three mil- 

 lion two iiundred and eighty-one thousand two hundred and aixty-eight 

 hundred weight ; during 1869, three million ilve hundred and fifty-one 

 thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight hundred weight. The undreBsed 

 Hemp Imported in 1868 was valued at £2,022,419. 



