534 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



REVIEWS OF BOOKS. 



" The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland." By H. J. Elwes and 

 A. Henry. Privately printed at Edinburgh. 



It is a pleasure to welcome this stately work, great alike in its 

 conception and in its execution. It is the product of two men who 

 have travelled much and observed carefully, and who unite in their 

 persons unusual perseverance and scientific acumen. Moreover, the 

 matter is handled in a fine literary spirit that is very attractive. 



The reader may, perhaps, at first be repelled by the entire lack of 

 systematic order that pervades the volumes, but there is much to be said 

 for publishing material as it comes to hand, and a thoroughly exhaustive 

 index will do much to make everything straight. One must therefore 

 not complain if Ginkgo is sandwiched in between the Araucarias and the 

 Tulip Tree, or if Taxodium follows directly after. Pyrus ; but perhaps a 

 mild protest may be permitted where pictures of the western hemlock 

 and of beeches are divided between two volumes. 



The first tree to be described is the beech, to which, in its various 

 species, twenty-seven pages of letterpress and fourteen full-page illustra- 

 tions are devoted. This tree is claimed, and rightly, as a true native of 

 England, and the authors evidently believe that it is also indigenous 

 to Scotland and Ireland, although there is no evidence to substantiate 

 the claim. They are, perhaps, hardly fair to the splendid work 

 accomplished by F. J. Lewis in the Scottish bogs, when they say that 

 " scarcely any scientific work has yet been done " in that country. But 

 although Lewis and others have discovered no remains of the beech in post- 

 glacial deposits, it is possible the authors may yet prove to be right in their 

 suggestion that the common beech is a Scottish tree, for, as is well known, 

 this species grows on dry calcareous uplands, which do not lend themselves 

 to the accumulation of vegetable deposits. 



The liability of this tree to injury when young by spring frost is 

 emphasised, and yet, two pages later, it is suggested that better returns 

 would be got from the beech woods of the Chilterns if the present 

 shelter-wood selection system were abandoned in favour of clear-felling, 

 with a rotation of sixty to one hundred years. It is not clear how, in 

 the latter case, the necessary seed for regeneration would be obtained, 

 nor is it shown how the destruction of the seedlings by late frosts would 

 be avoided. 



A considerable paragraph is devoted to the beech coccus, but this 

 must not lead one to expect that other special (monophagous) insects 

 will be similarly dealt with, as insects and also diseases are, for the most 

 part, left untouched. 



It is rather unexpected to find special stress laid on the hardiness of 

 Sophora japomca, which, according to the experience of others, is specially 

 liable to be frosted back in early life. In giving hints as to its cultivation, 

 it might have been well to advise careful treatment of its roots in the 



