eee 
BARLERIA. 
fully performs the operation, he invariably has 
the satisfaction of seeing the fructiferous proper- 
ties of the trees immediately and decidedly im- 
proved. Vines under glass in England are treated 
in the same manner. This practice of barking 
of fruit-trees is called nettoyés in France and 
Belgium, and was introduced to Great Britain 
about the year 1816 by Mr. Lyon of Edinburgh. 
Nicol’s Planter’s Kalendar—Monteath’s Forester’s 
Guide.—Treatise on Planting in Lib. of U. Know- 
ledge —Marshall’s Rural Economy of Yorkshire.— 
Loudon’s Gardener's Magazine. 
BARLERIA. A genus of tender, evergreen, or- 
namental plants, of the acanthaceous tribe. About 
a dozen species are cultivated in the hothouses 
of Great Britain ; and all of these, except two, 
are natives of the East Indies. The long-leaved 
species is a biennial herb, of two feet in height ; 
and the other species are perennial shrubs, of 
from two to four feet in height. One of the two 
species not from the East Indies is West Indian. 
and is probably the longest and best known in 
Britain. It is called a snapdragon in Jamaica, 
and the greater impatient Venus looking-glass by 
Miller. Its stem is hairy, branching, jointed, and 
about 4 feet high ; its leaves are oval, and grow 
in pairs and opposites, on short footstalks, at 
each joint of the stem; its flowers grow one by 
one at each division of a ramified or divided long 
footstalk, which is produced at each division of 
the branches ; each flower has a long pale tube, 
and a fine blue labiated summit ; and each seed- 
vessel is an oblong, membranaceous, two-celled 
capsule, and parts with its seeds by an elastic 
jerk. The juice of the leaf of one of the East In- 
dian species, Barleria prionitis, is a favourite med- 
icine of the Tamool practitioners, in those catar- 
‘rhal affections of children which are accompanied 
with fever and much viscid phlegm. 
BARLEY ,—botanically Hordeum. A genus of 
grasses, next in importance, in the British Islands 
and in many other parts of the world, to the 
genus triticum or wheat. Some of the species, 
indeed, rank as mere weeds, with scarcely an 
English name ; others rank as coarse herbage, 
under the name of barley-grasses ; and both of 
these groups ought, according to our usual prac- 
tice, to be noticed under the word Horprvum; yet, 
for the sake of affording a full view of barley in 
all its connexions, we shall discuss the whole in 
the present article. 
Ancient Barley—Barley, as a cereal grass, was 
known at a very early age of the world, and 
figures in remote records of both sacred and civil 
history, and has been unintermittedly and ex- 
tensively cultivated, in many parts of the world, 
from ancient times till the present day. During 
the hail-plague which fell in Egypt, previous to 
the exodus of the Israelites, “the flax and the 
barley were smitten ; for the barley was in the 
ear, and the flax was bolled.” In the peculiar 
system of sacred law, which was established 
over the Israelites through the ministry of Moses, 
—— 
BARLEY. 3390 
“oan homer of barley-seed was valued at fifty 
shekels of silver.” The land of Canaan, when the 
Israelites were about to be conducted into it as 
their patrimony, was described to them as “a 
good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains 
and depths that spring out of valleys and hills, a 
land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig- 
trees, and pomegranates, a land wherein they 
should eat bread without scarceness.” When 
Naomi and Ruth travelled from the land of Moab 
into the country of the Israelites, they “came to 
Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest ;” 
and the latter obtained the notice and the favour 
of Boaz in connexion with the gleaning and the 
winnowing of barley. David, at a critical mo- 
ment, during the rebellion of Absalom, received 
from some of his loyal followers an opportune 
supply of ‘beds, and basins, and earthen vessels, 
and wheat, and barley, and flour, and parched 
corn.” The seven sons of Saul, when delivered 
to the Gibeonites, “ fell all seven together, and 
were put to death in the days of harvest, in the 
first days, in the beginning of barley harvest.” 
When Solomon was at the apex of his great 
princely glory, “his officers provided victual for 
king Solomon, barley also and straw for the 
horses and dromedaries.” When Jotham pros- 
pered as king and conqueror, the Ammonites, on 
being subdued by him, gave him annually, for 
three years, “an hundred talents of silver, and 
ten thousand measures of wheat, and ten thousand 
of barley.” Other ancient notices of barley in 
the sacred record are equally explicit ; and some 
of them occur in association with circumstances 
and lessons of deeply impressive character. 
Pliny, the Roman naturalist, gives such a de- 
scription of the hordeum known and cultivated in 
the first century as completely identifies it with 
the British barley of the present day. He says 
that the root of hordeum comes out of the oppo- 
site end of the seed from the blade, that the 
radical end of the seed is larger than the blade 
end, that the blade of hordeum is rougher than 
the blade of triticum, that the ear of hordeum is 
almost bare, while that of triticum is covered 
with many coats, that hordeum has a shorter | 
stalk but a rougher and sharper beard than trit- 
icum, and that some kinds of hordeum have only 
two rows of grain in the ear, while other kinds 
have five. Columella mentions two kinds of bar- 
ley which were cultivated in Italy, the one called 
hexasticum or cantherinum, and the other called 
distichum or galatichum. Cato also speaks of 
barley, and classes it with such crops as are ex- 
hausting to land. Palladius says that barley 
delights in an open and dry soil, and, if sown 
upon a wet soil, dies. Virgil says, “ When the 
sun in Libra makes the days and nights equal, 
then sow barley, even towards the distant showers 
of the impracticable winter solstice.” Varro says 
that six modii of barley ought to be sown upon 
ajugerum. Other Roman notices of barley are 
quite as distinct, and show it to have been a 
rr nce tne vn wee 
