415 
air, without the aid of green-houses* particularly on the southern coast: in 
other parts of this island requires the protection of a green-house. 
2. Use. Armstrong, in his history of the island of Minorca, consider¬ 
ing myrtles as natives of Cornwall, recommends the cultivation of them, 
with a view to prevent oaks being cut down at an improper season, for the 
sake of more easily stripping off the bark; the tops of myrtle being used for 
tanning in Minorca. 
The young tops are used in dyeing. 
The berries are eaten by the natives of Minorca. 
The Common Myrtle is well known as an elegant evergreen shrub, native 
of Asia, Africa, and the southern parts of Europe; unfortunately just too 
tender to abide our winters without some protection in England, except in 
the most southern and western parts of the island. Trunk irregular, branch¬ 
ing, covered with a brown rough scaling bark. Leaves ovate or ovate- 
lanceolate, entire, smooth on both sides, dark-green paler underneath, opposite 
and decussated. The flowers come out singly from the axils, and have a 
two-leaved involucre under them. Corolla white. Berry inferior or below 
the calyx, subovate, crowned with the permanent calyx, fleshy and spongy, 
dark purple or black-blue, three-celled. Seeds in each cell four or five, 
seldom more, kidney-form, gibbous, whitish, shining, somewhat bony at 
the back, the belly filled with a fungous substance, fixed to the inner 
angle of the cells: they have a single, cartilaginous or somewhat bony, thick 
cover, no albumen, the embryo conformable to the cavity of the seed, round¬ 
ish, curved, milk-white: cotyledons semicylindric, short, incumbent: radicle 
twice the length of the cotyledons, semicircular, curved, inferior.* They 
flower in July and August. The cultivation of the Myrtle in England, is 
assigned in the Kew catalogue to the year 1029, when Parkinson informs us 
that he had three sorts (varieties) in his garden; the broad-leaved and two 
varieties of the box-leaved: Gerarde however, in 1 5Q?, says that Myrtles 
never bear any fruit in England, which surely implies the cultivation of it 
among us before that period. And Bradley informs us, that the Myrtle was 
introduced by Sir Francis Carew and Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585, when they 
resided in Spain, and discovered the preparations for the Spanish Armada 
against us.^ Mr. Evelyn also, in the year 1 6 / 8 , says, “ I know of one (a 
* Gaertner. 
•f* Husb. and Gard. Vol. TIT. part ii. p. 61. 
