those stratified bogs the lowermost timber. It is at the very bottom, reposing generally upon sand or clay, without any trace of vegetable mould, which appears to have been absorbed by the mosses, or incorporated with them into the very hard peat in which the oak is contained. It may be proper also to mention, that the roots of the oak are wholly contained in the moss, and do not, in any instance that we have seen, penetrate into the sand or clay. Some of the oaks that have been found in the peat mosses of Scotland are of large dimensions, and they are often met with in situations where oaks now grow with difficulty, and never attain any size; and hence, as the oak is not a native of very cold climates, we may conclude that the climate of those places must have been more genial at some former period than it is at present. Pines are not very generally found in the same bogs or mosses with oak; but when they are so, they occur about the same apparent period of the formation, and are to be traced only on the more elevated parts of the original surface on which the bog rests.

The stratum of peat in which the oak is contained is, as has been mentioned, of a compact texture, and some of it forms a fuel but little inferior to coal. Above it there is often found a stratum, in which there is much more wood than that below; but the kinds are different. Birch and hazel are the prevailing woods in that second stratum: the timber is in general decayed; but the nuts of the hazel are in a state of considerable preservation; and some of the seeds that have been found at this depth have vegetated, though they had probably lain for several centuries in the peat earth, in which their outer coats must have been literally tanned. When there is a third stratum of wood, which is not often the case, the timber which it contains is chiefly alder, with

the twigs of the bog-myrtle (Myrica Gale). After these, the peat becomes of a very spongy nature, and contains no vegetable substance of larger dimensions than the stem of a heath, and not very often that. The smaller portions of peat which lie in dells, in countries not much elevated, contain in general only the twigs and the nuts of hazel. The fall of timber is not, however, essential to the formation of peat bogs, for, in many of them, the remains of trees have not been found.

The pines found native in Britain, whether buried in the earth or growing on its surface, are all of one species, the Pinus sylvestris, or wild pine-in this country usually termed the Scotch fir. This pine is very generally diffused. It is found in all the northern regions, and in elevated ones considerably to the south. The timber which it produces is called red deal, or yellow deal, according to the colour; and as deals are the form in which it is most conveniently im

ported from Norway and the Baltic, the word deal has become the common name for all sorts of pine timber.

With the exception of cedar and larch, in respect of toughness and durability, Scotch fir produces better timber than any of the pines. It is good, too, almost in proportion to the slowness of its growth. When it is cut directly to the centre, or right across the grain, as for breasts of violins, and the soundingboards of other musical instruments, it is very beautiful, the little stripes formed by the annual layers being small and delicate, and in perfectly straight lines. This pine very often, though not in trees completely matured, contains sap-wood next the bark; and toward the pith it is a little spongy. The best part is that nearest the root; and the roots themselves are excellent for any purpose that their size and shape will answer. It has been mentioned, that pine timber is best in cold situations; it is also best on light soils, and when planted by Nature. On strong clay it grows badly, and the timber is worth little; and on rich loams, though it grows rapidly, the timber is of inferior quality, and contains a great deal of sap-wood. At what time the sap-wood changes to durable wood has not been determined by very accurate observation; although most writers on vegetable physiology conceive that the ligneous matter is deposited in the second year. We have counted four or five annual layers of sap upon some trees, more than a dozen on others; and where trees have been much exposed to the mid-day sun, we have seen the whole southern half little better than sap-wood, while the northern half contained only a layer or two at the circumference.

Pines, and this pine in particular, occur in much more extensive forests, and with a far less admixture of other trees, than any other genus whatever. Immense districts in North America are covered with

them; and so are the mountains of Sweden and Norway, and the sandy tracts near the Baltic. In Poland also, upon each side of the river Memel, they grow in great abundance, so that Memel fir is imported into this country in large quantities.

Though the pine is not the timber that we last meet with on the confines of the snow as we ascend high mountains, or at the verge of vegetation as we approach the pole, yet, after a certain elevation, and north of the latitude of about 55°, it is by far the most abundant timber, in Europe, in America, and in Asia. From the peculiar nature of the surface in Siberia, the country which occupies the north of Asia,-from the intense cold, and lowness of the portion next to the sea, the forests in that part of the world are not very extensive, till we arrive at some distance from the Arctic ocean. In America, too, there are naked tracts between the sea, or the ice, or the polar land, or whatever may, on the part of the boundary that has not been explored, lie further north than discovery has yet reached. But, from the summit of the ridge that extends from the dreary shores of Labrador westward, across the country, till it subsides in the central marshes about Lake Winnipec, and on the south side of the vast estuary of the St. Lawrence, as far as the boundary of the United States, the land, before it began to be cleared by European settlers, was covered by one immense forest of pine; and much of the clearing has been accomplished by burning, or otherwise destroying the trees. On the south side of the St. Lawrence, the forest reached down to the water along the whole shore, and upon the islands; and advantage has been taken of this to send a great deal of the most accessible of the timber to the European market, and to distil into tar a good deal of that which was not so accessible.

The pine forests of the north of Europe are, how

ever, the most valuable, especially on account of the quality of their timber. Once they abounded over the greater part both of the continent and the islands, but in the latter situations they have been exhausted somewhat wantonly. Not much more than a century, or a century and a half ago, there was an extensive pine forest in the north of Ireland, in that elevated part of the country which extends through the counties of Donegal and Tyrone, and separates the rivers that flow to the sea on the north, from those that flow south and east to Loughs Earn and Neagh. Hardly a vestige of that forest now remains, nor is there any very clear account of what became of it.

In the lowlands and rich soils of Scotland there perhaps never was an extensive pine forest; but there can be little doubt that upon the uplands the pine was once as general as it now is in the back settlements of Upper Canada. Of these forests many vestiges still remain. The fragment which lies farthest to the south-west is that of Rannoch, on the confines of the shires of Perth, Inverness, and Argyle. The greater part of that forest has, however, been felled, and the timber was floated down the Tummel and the Tay, for a distance of at least sixty miles to Perth, from Rannoch. The roots that remain bleaching on the surface, and the occasional trees that are still found in sheltered situations, or in situations which are not accessible, afford evidence that the forest once extended eastward not only to the remaining woods of Mar, at the sources of the Dee and the Don, in the west part of Aberdeenshire, but to the shore of the sea along that bleak ridge in the northern part of the county of Mearns, which forms the southern boundary of the valley of the Dee, and in the very extensive peat moss, upon which pine is the submerged timber almost exclusively found. Further to the north, the pine forest appears once to have

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