BEECH. 
ness and finish than is absolutely essential for | but being put ten days in water, it will exceed- 
comfort; and this circumstance alone would im-| ingly resist the worm.”—Young plants bear lop- 
ply that they have something of taste to exhibit, 
which produces to them a pleasurable emotion.” 
The Rev. Mr. Kirby has discovered that there 
are no less than two hundred and twenty-one 
distinct species of bees. He divides the Linnean 
genus into mellitta and apis, distinguishing them 
by their tongues; the insects of the first having 
short flattish inflected tongues.—See Goedartius 
De Insectis. — Swammerdam, Biblia Nature. — 
Geoffroy, Histoire Abregée des Insectes—Reaumur, 
Memoirs, tom. vi—P. Huber on Humble Bees : 
Transactions of the Linnean Society, vol. vi— 
Rennie’s Insect Architecture—Kirby’s Monographia 
Apium. | 
BEECH,—botanically Magus. A genus of or- 
namental timber trees, of the amentaceous tribe. 
The common species, Fagus sylvatica, abounds in 
the woods of Great Britain, and is one of our best 
known and most ornamental hardy trees. It is a 
native of the greater portion of northern Europe ; 
but whether it is a native of Great Britain, or was 
introduced at an early period of our sylvan culti- 
vation, is extremely doubtful. Hadit formed any 
part of our ancient forests, its mast could scarcely 
have failed to be preserved in our peat mosses 
along with hazel nuts and pine cones; yet it 
either does not exist in these mosses, or occurs 
in such paucity as hitherto to have escaped ob- 
servation. It usually attains a height of about 
70 feet, and sometimes soars to a far greater alti- 
tude; it has a grand and massive, though some- 
what formal and heavy outline; and it almost 
vies with the oak in stateliness of character and 
impressiveness of effect. Its stem is robust and 
powerful; its bark is smooth and silvery, and 
gives to the tree a neat, cleanly, and tasteful as- 
pect; its branches are numerous and spreading ; 
its foliage is peculiarly soft, smooth, and pleasing 
in summer, and becomes deeply tinted and almost 
gorgeous in its autumnal decay; its male flower 
has a bell-shaped five-cleft calyx, and from five 
to twelve stamina, and appears in April and May; 
and its female flower blooms on the same tree as 
the male, and has a four-cleft calyx and two or 
three styles ; and its seed is an angular or three- 
cornered nut, disposed singly or in couples in a 
muricate, four-valved capsule. 
The beech, when standing apart from other 
trees, and allowed to form its own natural head, 
is eminently ornamental—tIts timber is almost 
as necessary to cabinet-makers and turners, espe- 
cially about London, as the oak is to the ship- 
builder, or the ash to the plough and cart wright; 
and it is used also by wheel-wrights for cogs, 
felloes, and wheelspokes,—by ship-carpenters, for 
various minor purposes in dock-yards,—by musi- 
cal instrument makers, for sounding boards,—by 
coopers, for clap-boards,—and by the general 
population around some large towns, for fire- 
wood. Evelyn says, “ Where it lies dry, or wet 
and dry, it is exceedingly obnoxious to the worm; 
ping without any damage, and may easily be 
trained to form dense and lofty hedges. In some 
districts of Belgium, particularly in the vicinity 
of the village of St. Nicholas, between Ghent and 
Antwerp, very elegant and compact fences are 
formed by planting young beeches seven or eight 
inches apart, binding them together during the 
first season with osiers, and so bending and 
training them in opposite directions as to make 
them cross one another, and form a trellis, with 
apertures of four or five inches in diameter. Or- 
dinary beech hedges, however, are much less 
suitable than thorn ones for a farm, and serve 
best for the boundaries of a villa-ground, or the 
great divisions of a large garden.—The leaves, 
when gathered in autumn, before being injured 
by frost, make far better mattresses than either 
straw or chaff, and continue sweet and soft dur- 
ing seven or eight years; and they are also suc- 
cessfully employed, along with the leaves of other 
trees, in forming hotbeds, and. protecting covers 
for forcing sea-kale, asparagus, and other esculent 
plants.—The male catkins, when carefully col- 
lected and dried, and stored up for use, form an 
excellent packing for fruit; for they are as soft 
as cotton, and do not communicate any flavour 
to the fruit. 
The nut or seed, popularly called beech mast, 
is pleasant to the taste; when eaten in great 
quantities, it occasions giddiness and headache; 
when well dried and powdered, it may be made 
into wholesome bread ; and when dried and care- 
fully roasted, it can be used as a substitute for 
coffee. Hogs are very fond of the mast; and in 
some districts of England, where there are ex- 
tensive beech woods, these animals are main- 
tained, for successive months, entirely on this 
food. They thrive exceedingly on it; and many, 
of less than a year old, are killed for the market, 
after having been fattened exclusively with the 
mast; though others, which have been fed for 
four or five weeks on barley-meal or pease, yield 
better pork. A distemper called the garget, is 
liable to be produced in hogs from feeding on 
either beech-mast or acorns; and this may be 
prevented, by giving the animals, on every alter- 
nate day for two or three weeks, a few pease or 
beans, moistened with water, and sprinkled with 
a little finely-pulverized antimony.—An useful 
oil is obtained from beech nuts by expression ; it 
is nearly equal in flavour and delicacy to the 
best olive oil; it can be kept longer than that oil | 
without becoming rancid ; and it is used by the 
poorer inhabitants of Silesia as a substitute for 
butter. Two millions of bushels of beech nuts 
have been obtained, in a single season, from the 
forests of Eu and Crécy, in the department of 
the Oise. The refuse of the nuts, after the ex- 
pression of the oil, is given as food to poultry, 
swine, and cattle——The wood of beech affords a 
large quantity of alkali, and makes excellent 
a 
