387 
and out of an excrescence or fungus from the bole, boiled, beaten and dried 
in an oven, they make excellent touchwood, and the best balls to play 
withal; and being reduced to powder, it is an infallible remedy in the hae¬ 
morrhoids. They make also not only this small ware, but even small craft, 
pinnaces of Birch, ribbing them with white Cedar, and covering them with 
large flakes of Birch-bark, sew them with thread of Spruce roots, and pitch 
them; as it seems we did even here in Britain, as well as the Veneti.* Also 
for fuel: in many of the mosses in the west riding of Yorkshire, are often 
dug up Birch-trees, that burn and flame like fir and candle-wood; Pliny says, 
the Gauls extracted a sort of bitumen out of Birch. Great and small coals 
are made by the charring of this wood; as of the tops and loppings Mr. 
Howard’s new tan. The inner white cuticle and silken bark, which strips 
off of itself almost yearly, was anciently used for writing tables, before the 
invention of paper: and there is a Birch-tree in Canada, whose bark will 
serve to write on, and may be made into books, and of the twigs very pretty 
baskets. With the outward thicker and coarser part of the common Birch 
are divers houses in Russia, Poland, and those poor northern tracts covered, 
instead of slates and tile; nay in Sweden, the poor people grind the very 
bark, to mingle with their bread-corn. It is affirmed by Cardan, that some 
Birch-roots are so very extravagantly veined, as to represent the shapes of 
beasts, birds, trees, &c. Of the whitest part of the old wood, found com¬ 
monly in doating Birches, is made the ground of our effeminate farmed 
Gallants sweet powdery and of the quite consumed and rotten, is gotten 
the best mould for the raising of divers seedlings of the rarest plants and 
flowers; to say nothing here of the magisterial fasces, for which anciently 
the cudgels were used by Lictors, for lighter faults, as now the gentler rods 
by our tyrannical pedagogues. 
To this ample, and in some parts quaint account by our venerable planter, 
we may properly add the information of more modern times. 
The wood of our Birch is very white: women’s shoe-heels and pattens, 
and packing cases are made of it. It is planted along with Hazel, to make 
charcoal for forges. In the northern parts of Lancashire they make a great 
quantity of besoms with the twigs for exportation.^ 
The bark is of great use in dying wool yellow, and particularly in fixing 
* Lucan’s Pharsalia. 
f Silva edit. 4. 1706. fol. B. 1. c. 17. p. 8Q. 
J Withering. 
