GROWTH OF SCIADOPITYS VERTICILLATA = 225 
and requiring a continuous moisture at the roots. 
Experience here endorses that, and a tree grown 
under these conditions in nine years has grown from 
a height of 3 ft. toa height of 12 ft., and at an altitude 
of 800 ft. But this, from all we can learn, is a growth 
of rather remarkable exception. 
The Sciadopitys is one of those exceptional trees 
that seems to brighten up and improve all round 
after a sentence of transportation. Like a prophet 
that has no honour in his own country, it seems to be 
treated in its native land as a negligible quantity, 
while in our lands it is féted as a distinguished stranger 
of uncommon habits and agreeable appearance. 
Wherever it arrives it is tended with care and pam- 
pered unsparingly. As in the story of the well-fed 
house-dog in Asop’s Fables, the same animal, when 
let loose to fend for himself, presented a very different 
side of character, both in disposition and appearance. 
In Japan, from the evidences of those who have 
undertaken special expeditions to make its nearer 
acquaintance, it presents the appearance of an elon- 
‘gated maypole skimpily clad and scantily capped. 
Here, on the other hand—say, after at most. only a 
sojourn of fifty years with us, where it has re- 
ceived the minute attentions of a lapdog solicitude,— 
it exhibits a condition of a well-nourished, branched- 
from-top-to-toe apparition. 
How much the dunce that’s sent to roam 
Excels the dunce that stays at home, 
might a native of Hondo make remark and paraphrase 
upon if he chanced on one of our cherished specimens 
in an English garden! We can only add that, if the 
Japs do not rate them highly, we do, and from a 
lawn-scape or arboretum point of view they are 
much appreciated by many of us. 
