314 



A DISCOURSE 



BOOK I. used it for carts and other carriages, also for piles to superstruct on in 

 -^y^"^^ boggy grounds. Most of Venice and Amsterdam is built upon them, 

 with so excessive charge, that the foundations of their houses, as somie 

 report, cost as much as what is erected upon them, there being driven in 

 no fewer than thirteen thousand six hundred and fifty-nine great masts of 

 this timber under the new Stadt-house of Amsterdam. For scaffolding 

 also there is none comparable to it ; and I am sure we find it an extra- 

 ordinary saver of Oak, where it may be had at a reasonable price. I will 

 not complain what an incredible mass of ready money is yearly exported 

 into the northern countries for this sole commodity", which might all be 

 saved were we industrious at home, or could have it out of Virginia, 

 there being no country in the whole world stored with better ; they have, 

 besides, another sort of wood, which they call Cypress, much exceeding 

 either Fir or Pine for this purpose, being as tough and springy as Yew, 

 and bending to admiration ; it is also lighter than either, and everlasting 

 in wet or dry, so as I much wonder that we inquire no more after it. 

 In a word, not only here and there a house, but whole towns and great 

 cities are and have been built of Fir only ; not that alone in the north, as 

 Moscow, &c. where the very streets are paved with it, (the bodies of the 

 trees lying prostrate one by one in the manner of a raft,) but the re- 

 nowned city of Constantinople, and, nearer home, Thoulouse in France, 

 was, within little more than an hundred years, most of Fir, which is now 

 wholly marble and brick, after eight hundred houses had been burnt, as 

 it often happens at Constantinople — ^a place where no accident even of 

 this devouring nature will at all move them to rebuild with more lasting 

 materials. To conclude with the uses of Fir ; we have most of our pot- 

 ashes of this wood, together with our torch, or funebral staves ; nay, and 

 of old, spears of it, if we may credit Virgil's Amazonian combat : 



■ Cujus apertum 



Adversi longi transverberat abiete pectus. ^N. xi, 



. ■ She prest 



A long Fir spear through his exposed breast. 



^ Mr. Cox informs us, that in the city of Christiana alone, the capital of Norway, there 

 are 136 privileged saw-mills ; and that the quantity of planks permitted to be cut amounts 

 annually to 20,000,000 standard deals, twelve feet long, and one inch and a quarter thick. 



