find valuable to him for barter in the land of spirits as he had done in this world. In others the stock of arrow-heads was so enormous we may well suppose the occupier of the mound had been a maker of flint arrow-heads. The practices of modern savages often throw great light upon these difficult points. * Thus we find among the New Zealanders, if the owner dies, he is commonly buried in his house with all it contained. The islanders of Torres Straits also used their dwelling-huts as dead-houses.† It is still more significant that the Esquimaux themselves frequently leave the dead in the houses which they occupied when alive.‡ We cannot, says Sir John Lubbock, compare the plan of a Scandinavian "passage-grave" with that of an Esquimaux snow-house, without being struck with the great similarity existing between them. Under these circumstances there seems much probability in the view advocated by Professor Nilsson, the venerable archæologist of Sweden, that these "passage-graves" are a copy or adaptation of the dwelling-house; that the ancient inhabitants of Scandinavia, unable to imagine a future altogether different from the present, or a world quite unlike our own, showed their respect and affection for the dead by burying with them those things which in life they had valued most; with women their ornaments, with warriors their weapons. They buried the house with its owner, and the grave was literally the dwelling of the dead.§ From the foregoing premises we may venture to establish this axiom, namely, that any people who accompanied the rites of interment of their dead by such evident indications of care and attention as we find in a vast number of graves belonging to different periods and races in Western Europe and America, may be safely concluded to have possessed a notion of a future state, whatever may have been the name they ascribed to it; and moreover they must have also believed it possible, by their gifts and good offices, to assist their departed friends into the spirit land. Tylor, New Zealand and its Inhabitants,' p. 101. + M'Gillivray,' Voyage of Rattle-snake,' vol. ii., p. 48. Ross Arctic Expedition,' 1829-33, p. 290. § Lubbock, 'Pre-historic Times,' pp. 126-7. VI. FOREIGN TREES AND PLANTS FOR ENGLISH GARDENS.* By ALFRED W. BENNETT, M.A., B.Sc., F.L.S. THE introduction of new forms of vegetable life into our gardens and greenhouses has made considerable progress during recent years. The Acclimatisation Societies of Paris and London have, it is true, paid more attention to the domestication of foreign animals than of plants; something, however, has been attempted in this direction, and with considerable success. This branch of acclimatisation would, indeed, seem likely to be the most fertile in results beneficial to mankind. For one fresh animal introduced that will be of real utility, there will probably be a dozen plants that yield important economical products. The early races of mankind appear to have exhausted our powers over the lower animals-the horse, the ass, the dog, the camel, the ox, the sheep, were all brought under subjection to man at the earliest period of his history; and within historic times no important addition has been made to the number of our domestic animals. Not so with plants. A large number of the vegetable substances used as food at the present day, and of the vegetable articles of manufacture, were unknown to the ancients; and the field for further extension of our utilisation of the vegetable kingdom seems indefinitely large. The power of cultivation in modifying plants is also much greater than any corresponding power of domestication in modifying animals. The oldest extant drawings of the horse, the ox, or the camel, scarcely point out any distinctive features from their descendants now living; the potato and the apple, on the other hand, may almost be considered as manufactured products; while many gardeners' flowers, such as the Pelargonium and the Tulip, differ so widely from their ancestors as, in some cases, to obscure their parentage. The term Acclimatisation has been objected to by some scientific men, on the ground that the descendants of any animal or plant which has been transported from one climate to another have no more power than their ancestor of adapting themselves to that climate, unless the principle of Natural Selection has come into play to eliminate the individuals least able to adapt themselves to the new climate, those only surviving which, from some cause or other, are most suited to the fresh conditions. Be this as it may, there is no question about the fact that the farmer The Planter's Guide: Trees and Shrubs for English Plantations.' By A. Mongredien. London: J. Murray, 1870. 'Alpine Flowers for English Gardens.' By W. Robinson, F.L.S. London: J. Murray. 1870. 'Dendrologie: Bäume, Sträucher, und Halb-sträucher welche in Mittel oder Nord-Europa im Freien kultivirt werden.' Kritisch bearbeitet von Karl Koch. Erster Theil. Erlangen. Enke, 1869. and the gardener have it in their power to naturalise plants foreign to our climate and our soil. A But the conditions of this naturalisation are by no means so simple as might at first sight appear. It might naturally be supposed that all we have to do is to introduce those plants which grow spontaneously in a climate and a soil similar to our own, and that they will necessarily flourish, and will scarcely be aware of the change. Or, if they come from a warmer country, that all that is needed is to protect them by glass and artificial warmth from the inclemency of our winters. But in practice this is not found to be the case. plant will frequently obstinately refuse to become naturalised in a country, the climatal and geological conditions of which are similar to those that occur in the region where it is indigenous. Our common daisy, a native of almost every country of Europe, is said to have resisted all attempts to introduce it even into the gardens of the United States. Some plants seem to have an unconquerable aversion to the fostering hand of man, even in their own country. A wellconstructed and carefully-kept fernery will contain specimens, more or less luxuriant, of nearly all our native ferns; the polypody and hartstongue from shady banks and tree-stumps; the so-called male and female ferns from the woods; the spleenwort from dry walls; even the royal "flowering-fern" from bogs; and some of the semialpine species will flourish with the exercise of a little care. One kind, however, is almost invariably absent, and that the most widely distributed of all our ferns, the common brake, a native of every county and almost of every parish in the country, but which can seldom be induced to remain a denizen of soil that has once been brought under man's dominion. On the other hand, some of the greatest favourites of our gardens, which display no coyness whatever in overrunning our flower-beds, are natives of countries where the climate presents very different features to our own, or of very limited tracts of our own country, to which they seem strictly confined by impassable barriers of soil or meteorological conditions. To take instances of the latter phenomenon:-There is no garden flower more cosmopolitan in its tastes, more certain to thrive under any conditions of light or heavy soil, sun or shade, care or neglect, even in the heart of a town, as its very name seems to indicate, than the London Pride. Yet the Saxifraga umbrosa is one of the most restricted in distribution of our native plants. Abundant enough where it does grow, it is yet entirely confined to the moist equable climate of the hilly country in the south-west of Ireland and a few other similar localities, beyond which it is never found in the wild state. Botanists will think themselves amply repaid for a toilsome day's march by gathering the beautiful Polemonium cæruleum in its native habitat among the calcareous hills of the west of Yorkshire; yet the Jacob's Ladder is an ornament of every garden on the very stiffest part of the London clay. Probably every piece of cultivated ground, which contains a laburnum tree, produces each spring a plentiful crop of self-sown young trees, which come up without the least care or protection until destroyed in the process of weeding; yet the laburnum shows no disposition to take a place among the naturalised trees of our woods and hedges, although the seeds must often be carried there by birds. It is remarkable that many of our common vegetables, the cabbage, the asparagus, the sea-kale, the celery, are natives of our own shores, never growing spontaneously out of reach of the salt spray; and yet requiring, when transplanted into our gardens, no peculiarity of soil or treatment to enable them to support a vigorous existence. These are instances of plants to which our climate appears entirely congenial, and yet which seem as if they could not propagate themselves with us or spread, except under man's protection. Others, again, appear to require only to get a footing in a foreign soil to become established in it with extraordinary rapidity, even to the overmastering or expulsion of some of the indigenous inhabitants. When Australia and New Zealand were first colonized by Europeans, their flora presented an aspect of perfect strangeness, very few of the native trees or flowers belonging even to genera common to Europe. The seeds of some of our English weeds were, however, introduced, intentionally or accidentally, by the early settlers; and now the thistle covers the waste lands of Australia as it does in England, and the clover and the groundsel everywhere remind the Englishman of his far-away home, and have become as completely at home as the mustangs or wild-horses on the pampas of South America. In our own country a very remarkable instance of this rapid naturalisation has occurred in the case of the Elodea canadensis or Canadian water-weed; which, introduced not many years since into our canals from Canada, has now become such a pest in many places as seriously to impede the navigation. Other instances might be mentioned of foreign plants introduced with seed having in a very short time become common weeds in all cultivated land. Indeed, many of the species included in our handbooks of British plants are so entirely confined to arable land or to spots in the immediate vicinity of human dwellings, that it is impossible to say how many of them may be really indigenous to the soil, and how many naturalised aliens. There is no doubt we have a great deal to learn as to the mode in which plants propagate themselves in nature, which may be of the utmost value to our gardeners. Every one is familiar with the fact of the apparently spontaneous appearance, in immense abundance, of plants in soil when subjected to certain farming operations, or on the sowing of some particular crop. way cutting or embankment is made, some plant unknown in the Whenever a new railneighbourhood is almost sure to appear, and either permanently establish itself or again disappear after a few years. The "sowing of land with lime is invariably followed by the appearance of a crop of white or Dutch clover. When certain kinds of wood are cut down, it is said that during the next year a particular species of moss will always be found covering the ground. Immediately after the great fire of London in 1666, the London Rocket (Sisymbrium Irio) sprang up in enormous quantities on the dismantled walls, but is now no longer to be found in the metropolitan district. The usual theory to account for this sudden appearance of new plants is the existence in the soil of large "stores of seeds" ready to germinate on the first favourable opportunity. In his Anniversary Address to the Linnean Society in 1869, Mr. Bentham, however, pointed out that if this explanation is the true one, it ought not to depend merely on theory, but would be capable of easy practical verification. He suggested whether a hitherto insufficiently acknowledged part in the rapid dissemination of plants may not be played by birds. The whole subject presents a wide field for further investigation, and must amply reward any one who takes up the inquiry, if endowed with the qualities of accurate observation and patient research. Mr. Mongredien's Planter's Guide' deals chiefly with the introduction into this country of foreign trees and shrubs. Within the last twenty or thirty years the appearance of our lawns and plantations has been greatly changed by the number of new forms which have made their appearance. The stately Wellingtonia, the formal self-asserting "Puzzle - monkey" or Araucaria imbricata, the massive Deodar and Cryptomeria, the elegant Pinus insignis and Cupressus Lawsoniana, are all still of too recent introduction to permit us to judge of what their effect will be when grown to their full stature. The number of cone-bearing trees from all parts of the world, perfectly hardy in this climate, is extraordinary; and, partly from their graceful shape, partly from the evergreen character of their leaves, the attention of cultivators has been perhaps too exclusively confined to them, while deciduous trees have been comparatively neglected. Recent experiments have shown that in this quarter also there is abundant room for an extension of our powers of domestication. In one of the London Parks least frequented by the upper ten thousand, that at Battersea, great success has attended the introduction, during the last few years, of half-hardy trees and shrubs, the precaution being taken of protecting their roots during winter by a layer of some substance impervious to frost. The French have paid more attention to the perfect naturalisation of half-hardy plants than we have done: notwithstanding the greater severity of their winter, species are grown by them out of doors which are never seen with us except in greenhouses; even as far north as Paris, the bamboo, for instance, is frequently met with in |