12 The Naturalist in Siluria. 



establishment, with plenty of pickings for the fringillidce. 

 No doubt the reason for the sparrows keeping away from 

 my premises is because the house, outbuildings and all, 

 is overshadowed by tall trees, and the i^asaer domesticus 

 prefers to perch on hawthorn bush orSbare gable-end. 



VEGETATION ON THE OLD RED. 



The soil of the Old Red Sandstone seems wonderfully 

 congenial to certain plants of the order conipositce. At 

 l(M>t some strata of it are so, for in a system of rocks 

 10,000 feet thick, and deposited during countless ages, 

 there must be much variety in the nature of the deposited 

 substances. 



I here speak of strata high up in the system, close to 

 the Carboniferous, but under the shales and Conglomer- 

 ate of the Old Red itself. In my kitchen garden, whose 

 soil is over a seam of this kind, there grow Jerusalem 

 artichokes that remind me of the tropics, recalling a 

 brake of bamboo cane. A six-foot man standing on the 

 back of a sixteen-hands horse could not touch their tops 

 with his hand upraised to its highest ; an average stalk, 

 which I have submitted to measurement, proving to be 13 

 ffiet 3 inches — without reckoning the roots — and having 

 a girth of 4| inches ! Not a bad growth for temperate 

 zone vegetation, within a period of less than six months. 



I believe that both the Jerusalem artichoke and its 

 near congener, the sunflower (Helianthus annuiis), might 

 be profitably cultivated in this district ; the former not 

 only for its tubers, but the stalks and leaves as an article 

 of fodder ; while the seeds of the latter are well known to 

 be nourishing food for poultry, fowls and turkeys beino- 

 alike fond of it. 



