BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. Lois 
and bake this mixture as thin as our (Scotch) oat cakes. This 
is so far from being uneatable, that prudent housekeepers in 
good circumstances use it to save their seed corn, even when 
grain is not dear; and the ruddy cheeks of the country girls prove 
that it is no unwholesome food, qualified no doubt as it is with 
plenty of butter and milk and hard work. The half and half, 
however, tastes strongly of timber and gets as hard as a board 
when kept long.” 
So, too, von Buch,* writing of Norway : — 
‘¢ When the young and vigorous fir-trees are felled, to the great 
injury of the woods, the tree is stripped of its bark for its whole 
length; the outer part is carefully peeled from the bark; the 
deeper interior covering is then shaved off; and nothing remains 
but the innermost rind, which is extremely soft and white. It is 
then hung up several days in the air to dry, and afterwards baked 
in an oven; it is next beaten on wooden blocks, and then pounded 
as finely as possible in wooden vessels ; but all this is not enough ; 
the mass is yet to be carried to the mill and ground into coarse 
‘meal, like barley or oats. ‘This meal is mixed with hewel( ?), with 
threshed-out ears, or with a few moss seeds; and a bread of 
about an inch thickness is formed of this composition.” 
Clarke ft refers to the matter repeatedly : — 
‘¢In this village the bread of the poor peasants was worse than 
any we had yet seen; it consisted of the inner bark of the fir-tree 
mixed with chaff and a very little barley. It seemed to us almost 
inconceivable that such bread could contain nourishment. We 
brought some of it to England; where it has remained ever since, 
unaltered, and in the same state in which it was offered to us 
for food.” 
‘¢ To add to the general wretchedness of the country, a greater 
dearth had prevailed during the former winter than the oldest 
person ever remembered. The people had saved themselves from 
starving by eating the bark bread, and a bread which they said 
they made of a kind of grass: this grass we afterwards found to 
be sorrel (Rhumex acetosa). ‘The fir-bread had given to many 
of the inhabitants an unhealthy appearance; they found the 
sorrel bread upon the whole more salutary. The general effect 
of eating fir-bread is to produce a yellow, pale, and unhealthy 
countenance.” { 
* Von Buch cited by E. D. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries, 1824, 
9. 400, footnote. 
+ E. D. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries, 1824, 9, 515. 
t fbid., 10. 473, 474. 
