Part 34 (1/2)

kitchen implements are of copper or of clay, the ordinary tools for working wood are of a very inferior description, and the locust timber is found too hard for their temper. Southey informs us, in ”Espriella's Letters,” that when a small quant.i.ty of mahogany was brought to England, early in the last century, the cabinetmakers were unable to use it, from the defective temper of their tools, until the demand for furniture from the new wood compelled them to improve the quality of their implements.

In America, the cheapness of wood long made it the preferable material for almost all purposes to which it could by any possibility be applied.

The mechanical cutlery and artisans' tools of the United States are of admirable temper, finish, and convenience, and no wood is too hard, or otherwise too refractory, to be wrought with great facility, both by hand tools and by the mult.i.tude of ingenious machines which the Americans have invented for this purpose.

[284] _etudes Forestieres_, p. 7.

[285] _etudes Forestieres_, p. 7.

[286] For very full catalogues of American forest trees, and remarks on their geographical distribution, consult papers on the subject by Dr. J.

G. Cooper, in the Report of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution for 1858, and the Report of the United States Patent Office, Agricultural Division, for 1860.

[287] Although Spenser's catalogue of trees occurs in the first canto of the first book of the ”Faery Queene”--the only canto of that exquisite poem actually read by most students of English literature--it is not so generally familiar as to make the quotation of it altogether superfluous:

VII.

Enforst to seeke some covert nigh at hand, A shadie grove not farr away they spide, That promist ayde the tempest to withstand; Whose loftie trees, yelad with sommers pride, Did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide, Not perceable with power of any starr: And all within were pathes and alleies wide, With footing worne, and leading inward farr; Faire harbour that them seems; so in they entred ar.

VIII.

And foorth they pa.s.se, with pleasure forward led, Joying to heare the birdes sweete harmony, Which therein shrouded from the tempest dred, Seemd in their song to scorne the cruell sky.

Much can they praise the trees so straight and hy, The sayling pine; the cedar stout and tall; The vine-propp elm; the poplar never dry; The builder oake, sole king of forrests all; The aspine good for staves; the cypresse funerall;

IX.

The laurell, meed of mightie conquerours And poets sage; the firre that weepeth still; The willow, worne of forlorn paramours; The eugh, obedient to the benders will; The birch for shaftes; the sallow for the mill; The mirrhe sweete-bleeding in the bitter wound; The warlike beech; the ash for nothing ill; The fruitfull olive; and the platane round; The carver holme; the maple seeldom inward sound.

[288] The walnut is a more valuable tree than is generally supposed. It yields one third of the oil produced in France, and in this respect occupies an intermediate position between the olive of the south, and the oleaginous seeds of the north. A hectare (about two and a half acres), will produce nuts to the value of five hundred francs a year, which cost nothing but the gathering. Unfortunately, its maturity must be long waited for, and more nut-trees are felled than planted. The demand for its wood in cabinet work is the princ.i.p.al cause of its destruction. See LAVERGNE, _economie Rurale de la France_, p. 253.

According to Cosimo Ridolfi (Lezioni Orali, ii. p. 424), France obtains three times as much oil from the walnut as from the olive, and nearly as much as from all oleaginous seeds together. He states that the walnut bears nuts at the age of twenty years, and yields its maximum product at seventy, and that a hectare of ground, with thirty trees, or twelve to the acre, is equal to a capital of twenty-five hundred francs.

The nut of this tree is known in the United States as the ”English walnut.” The fruit and the wood much resemble those of the American black walnut, _Juglans nigra_, but for cabinet work the American is the more beautiful material, especially when the large knots are employed.

The timber of the European species, when straight grained, and _clear_, or free from knots, is, for ordinary purposes, better than that of the American black walnut, but bears no comparison with the wood of the hickory, when strength combined with elasticity is required, and its nut is very inferior in taste to that of the s.h.a.gbark, as well as to the b.u.t.ternut, which it somewhat resembles.

”The chestnut is more valuable still, for it produces on a sterile soil, which, without it, would yield only ferns and heaths, an abundant nutriment for man.”--LAVERGNE, _economie Rurale de la France_, p. 253.

I believe the varieties developed by cultivation are less numerous in the walnut than in the chestnut, which latter tree is often grafted in Southern Europe.

[289] This fir is remarkable for its tendency to cicatrize or heal over its stumps, a property which it possesses in common with some other firs, the maritime pine, and the European larch. When these trees grow in thick clumps, their roots are apt to unite by a species of natural grafting, and if one of them be felled, although its own proper rootlets die, the stump may continue, sometimes for a century, to receive nourishment from the radicles of the surrounding trees, and a dome of wood and bark of considerable thickness be formed over it. The cicatrization is, however, only apparent, for the entire stump, except the outside ring of annual growth, soon dies, and even decays within its covering, without sending out new shoots.

[290] At the age of twelve or fifteen years, the cork tree is stripped of its outer bark for the first time. This first yield is of inferior quality, and is employed for floats for nets and buoys, or burnt for lampblack. After this, a new layer of cork, an inch or an inch and a quarter in thickness, is formed about once in ten years, and is removed in large sheets without injury to the tree, which lives a hundred and fifty years or more. According to Clave (p. 252), the annual product of a forest of cork oaks is calculated at about 660 kilogrammes, worth 150 francs, to the hectare, which, deducting expenses, leaves a profit of 100 francs. This is about equal to 250 pound weight, and eight dollars profit to the acre. The cork oaks of the national domain in Algeria cover about 500,000 acres, and are let to individuals at rates which are expected, when the whole is rented, to yield to the state a revenue of about $2,000,000.

George Sand, in the _Histoire de ma Vie_, speaks of the cork forests in Southern France as among the most profitable of rural possessions, and states, what I do not remember to have seen noticed elsewhere, that Russia is the best customer for cork. The large sheets taken from the trees are slit into thin plates, and used to line the walls of apartments in that cold climate.

[291] The walnut, the chestnut, the apple, and the pear are common to the border between the countries I have mentioned, but the range of the other trees is bounded by the Alps, and by a well-defined and sharply drawn line to the west of those mountains. I cannot give statistical details as to the number of any of the trees in question, or as to the area they would cover if brought together in a given country. From some peculiarity in the sky of Europe, cultivated plants will thrive, in Northern Italy, in Southern France, and even in Switzerland, under a depth of shade where no crop, not even gra.s.s, worth harvesting, would grow in the United States with an equally high summer temperature. Hence the cultivation of all these trees is practicable in Europe to a greater extent than would be supposed reconcilable with the interests of agriculture. Some idea of the importance of the olive orchards may be formed from the fact that Sicily alone, an island scarcely exceeding 10,000 square miles in area, of which one third at least is absolutely barren, has exported to the single port of Ma.r.s.eilles more than 2,000,000 pounds weight of olive oil per year, for the last twenty years.

[292] It is hard to say how far the peculiar form of the graceful crown of this pine is due to pruning. It is true that the extremities of the topmost branches are rarely lopped, but the lateral boughs are almost uniformly removed to a very considerable height, and it is not improbable that the shape of the top is thereby affected.

[293] Besides this, in a country so diversified in surface--I wish we could with the French say _accidented_--as Italy with the exception of the champaign region drained by the Po, every new field of view requires either an extraordinary _coup d'[oe]il_ in the spectator, or a long study, in order to master its relief, its plans, its salient and retreating angles. In summer, the universal greenery confounds light and shade, distance and foreground; and though the impression upon a traveller, who journeys for the sake of ”sensations,” may be strengthened by the mysterious annihilation of all standards for the measurement of s.p.a.ce, yet the superior intelligibility of the winter scenery of Italy is more profitable to those who see with a view to a.n.a.lyze.

[294] Copse, or coppice, from the French _couper_, to cut, signifies properly a wood the trees of which are cut at certain periods of immature growth, and allowed to shoot up again from the roots; but it has come to signify, very commonly, a young wood, grove, or thicket, without reference to its origin, or to its character of a forest crop.

[295] It has been recently stated, upon the evidence of the Government foresters of Greece, and of the queen's gardener, that a large wood has been discovered in Arcadia, consisting of a fir which has the property of sending up both vertical and lateral shoots from the stump of felled trees and forming a new crown. It was at first supposed that this forest grew only on the ”mountains,” of which the hero of About's most amusing story, _Le Roi des Montagnes_, was ”king;” but it is now said that small stumps, with the shoots attached, have been sent to Germany, and recognized by able botanists as true natural products.