30 ACCLIMATATION. 
placed on elevated ground a plot of the one can be known 
from the other at the distance of a mile. In some warm 
situations in England, however, the plants from Continental 
seed are found to succeed, and with ample shelter they grow 
rapidly ; while as timber trees in Scotland they are utterly 
worthless in exposed situations. 
The larch is another tree of great importance whose ante- 
cedents stand much in need of investigation. We often see it 
stricken down when young and in the vigour of growth, in 
the absence of any visible disease, assuming all the appear- 
ance of an exotic of too tender a constitution to endure the 
climate of this country. -This sometimes occurs in the vicinity 
of plantations of the same species, which luxuriate in the same 
description of soil. The difference is occasioned by acclimata- 
tion. No doubt the tree is to be found in some parts of its 
native Alpine regions inured for generations to all the ex- 
posure and cold that the species is capable of enduring, and 
we might reasonably expect that the seeds of such trees would 
produce plants quite suitable for the climate of this country. 
On the Continent, however, the larch has now been cultivated 
for generations as useful timber—in France, Germany, Prussia, 
etc. etc., in a climate adapted to the vine ; so that seeds grown 
in such districts and imported have of late failed to such an 
extent as to cause the species, in some parts of our country, to 
be altogether abandoned as a timber tree. The former genera- 
tion of trees having been acclimatized or inured to great heat, 
their offspring are unfit for at once enduring the extreme 
change of Scottish moorland. Hence the sad spectacle to be 
met with in many extensive plantations, of hundreds of acres of 
larch of no value, where the cost of plants and planting, in 
some cases, is required to clear the ground of trees in which 
life is only apparent. 
Many years have elapsed since I first cbserved the advan- 
tage of acclimatization on the larch. In late seasons the 
tenderness of plants grown from imported seed is readily 
observed at every age, in nursery treatment; not only with 
respect to the white larch of the Tyrol, which is the tenderest 
