ORIGIN OF NAMES ABIES AND PICEA 107 
height, and the Spruce that provided the pix 
liquida, the boiling liquid pitch, that was—but is 
not now—-employed for purposes of torture in the 
days of the early Roman Empire. | 
In the long-ago past of pre-Virgilian days maybe 
there was some cause for confusion as to whether 
the word Abies referred to Silver Fir, or whether 
Picea stood for a Spruce, or whether, vice versa, a 
Spruce was an Abies and a Silver Fir a Picea. This 
difference seems to have developed into quite a 
long-standing cause célébre in the courts of botanical 
jurisprudence. As a contest of wits it was a case 
of a lead-off between two no less renowned Romans 
than Pliny called the Elder on the one side, and 
Virgilius Maro of Georgic fame on the other. In the 
courts of appeal the verdict has gone in favour of 
Virgil, and from our point of view rightly. Virgil 
was born and lived on his parental farm, while Pliny 
led the life of a soldier and barrister-at-law in turn. 
Virgil lived a generation before Pliny and so was first 
in the field, not only agriculturally speaking, but 
from a previous generation point of view, if that goes 
for anything, at a date when the Jaudator temporis 
acti is apt to be quoted at a discount. One more 
word in favour of this judgment: either the author 
of the Georgics was an authority on country life, or 
vast sums of parental money have been from time 
immemorial thrown away on the public schools’ 
curriculum in England. From an extract in his oft- 
construed epic poem, the A‘neid, it has been shown 
(v. Veitch’s Book of Conifers) that he referred to the 
existence of Abies growing in a locality in which 
Silver Firs have always been knowni-to flourish, and 
where Spruces—it is equally well known—have 
never seen the light of day, or still less those heights 
in the heavens that so many of the Abies reach. 
Jf this is not conclusive reasoning that the Silver 
