The actual damage which insects do to our orchards and grain-fields, even where birds are incessantly devouring them, is very considerable, as every farmer and every gardener knows to his sorrow. What it would be without this mitigation, no reckoning can tell. As the shoal which comes back where a single herring has spawned, so is the devouring host of worms which a single winged moth will leave as its progeny. The birds which devour the worms are by no means so useful, as Dr. Piper shows, as those which devour insects on the wing. And it is therefore no objection to swallows that they daintily prefer butterflies to caterpillars, and are more given to the noble chase of a flying prey than to the wearisome delving of slow clodhoppers.

We do not urge the practical consideration of easy and handy shooting, which led once a lazy sporting friend of ours to choose the neighborhood of a wood for his summer residence, so that he might, like a Pacha of the Lebanon, fire from his chamber window without removing his pipe or doffing his slippers, since we hold this whole passion for small-bird shooting in utter abomination, as the basest form which sport can take. But for any passion to which birds must minister, it is needful to provide for them shelter and a home, — a place to hide and a place to build. Farmers and lovers alike must have their forest aviary, to exterminate borers or to indite sonnets of harmonious numbers, to rid the air of its plague of flies or to pen the sweet invocation,

A question of much interest, which we trust Dr. Piper will treat fully in some of his future numbers, is of the fitness of mingling fruit and forest trees. There are horticulturists who hold that the close-communion doctrine is the only one to be applied to orchards; that elms must be kept separate from plums as much as sinners from saints, and that an oak among apple-trees is as much an intruder as the serpent in Paradise. We are inclined to a different view, believing that the shade which large forest-trees give to an orchard and the moisture which they retain are very important to the healthy growth

of the fruit-bearing kinds. Some of the finest peach-trees we have ever known were nurtured beneath the shadow of a tall sycamore; and in walking along the edge of woods, we have often stopped to admire the sturdy limbs and luscious crop of some ancient apple-tree. Grapes ripen readily in the thick shade. On the continent of Europe it is quite common to find the orchards belted with rows of forest-trees, set there to break the force of the winds. And it may be safely predicted, that he who has his orchard protected by this means will gather a third more fruit than he who leaves the slender trees exposed. At present, in most of our orchards, the crop consists very largely of windfalls, which become food for swine, but not for men. It may answer for one who can afford it to use his peaches for the creation of pork, but that luxurious diet will prove in the end, we think, rather expensive.

Connected with this is another question, as to the advantage of mingling varieties of trees in forest planting. That picturesque effect is gained by this method there can be no doubt, as any one may see on the grounds of Mr. Tudor at Nahant. The more shades and shapes and contrasts it shows, the greater is the charm of a park, as well as of a garden. The inferior species of tree are dignified when set in the society of the monarchs of the grove, and draw honor from their privilege. The larch and the birch command more deference as courtiers of the majestic pine, than in any equal democracy of their own kind, however populous. The most ungainly trunk will have beauty in the forest, and he who will renew credit to those stunted cedars, which recall only by utter contrast the precious growth of ancient Lebanon, has but to plant them under the broad-leaved sycamore, or by the side of the symmetrical chestnut. Whether economy is well served by this mingling of many varieties, we are not so ready to say. Nature, indeed, mingles trees in the forests. Yet most forests have some prevailing species, which gives them their character. Oaks among the pines seem as alien as Greeks among the Jews, and a silver-leaved aspen, slender and tremulous, among the lithe and sinewy ash-trees, reminds us of a pale missionary preaching with fear and trembling to

a tribe of dusky Indians. The prevalent idea of planters is, we imagine, that the most profitable forests are homogeneous; that the growth is more rapid, and the influence upon the soil more wholesome. The French government, which has done more than any other in the culture of forests, rather favors this theory, and encourages the separation of kinds, where large returns are expected. In the Department of Landes it has chiefly replanted pines; on the slopes of the Pyrenees the box is the favorite variety; while in Brittany and Normandy the linden abounds. In Scotland the larch has been most extensively cultivated, and more than ten thousand acres with more than fourteen million of trees were planted in less than a century by the single family of Athol. This example has been copied in other parts of Europe, and one is often surprised to find in secluded places, like the region of the Tegernsee in Southern Bavaria, beautiful artificial forests of larches. In Greece, the prepossession seems. to have been for plane-trees, and on the hills of Laconia a recent traveller, M. About, has remarked the wanton and wasteful destruction of these noble monuments of the Turkish dominion.

The best method of planting, transplanting, pruning, thinning, and felling trees, is a subject which warns us back by its extent, and by the confusion of opinions which surrounds its discussion. We see no occasion to change the opinion expressed twenty-five years ago in this Review, that in most, if not in all cases, it is better to raise trees from the seed, elm-trees and ash-trees no less than oak and hickory. We renew the protest, too, against the Procrustean truncation of saplings, which, to make the labor of removal a little easier, decorates for a lustrum our door-yards with a line of tufted poles. We would repeal, also, that tradition of arboricultural common law, which enjoins an annual use of the knife, so much wood to be exscinded every year, so many feet of trunk to be gained; and particularly do we object to that "law of selection," which destroys the vigor of the forest in decimating it. It is as bad for a forest to lose its great trees as for a nation to lose its great men, the small trees and the small men alike assume meaner habits when they strive for the vacant places which the great have left.

For the successful culture of young trees, the first and almost the only necessity is that they be protected from the winds. The character of the soil is of less importance. The wind distorts and destroys them. They need most in the beginning that protection which they afterward effectually give. A close fence for a few years will secure the most tender fruit-trees on the very edge of an ocean cliff. Next to this, it is of importance that the soil about the roots be kept loose and porous, which a surface-covering of stones best accomplishes. Nine tenths of the trees which die after their transplanting, die because these essentials are neglected, not for any fault in the trees or in the soil. We should remark upon this point more at length, were we not advised that it will form a prominent topic in some future number of Dr. Piper's work.

All the topics which have been touched in this article will doubtless be fully discussed in the progress of the work we have noticed, and any novel opinions will be vouched for by abundant facts. One great fact is patent, and should of itself be enough to arouse the concern of all who are anxious about the future, that trees in this section of the country are disappearing far more rapidly than they are growing. The present annual demand for locomotive fuel alone in the United States is one hundred thousand acres, allowing (which is a large allowance) fifty cords to the acre; and yet this, large as it is, is but one among many items. Along the line of our older railways there are scarcely any woods remaining. If the rate of disappearance goes on for the next half-century as it has for the last, the child is now living who will see the soil of New England everywhere as bare as the soil of Attica, and its noble rivers shrunken in summer, like Acheloüs and Cephissus, to shallow brooks. It is fashionable in many quarters to treat alarms of this kind as fantastic, and our tourists come back from a journey to Mount Katahdin or the Saguenay with the comforting conviction, that there is wood enough left in these Northern regions to supply the wants of America for a thousand years. We would rather trust to facts and figures than to these hopeful impressions. Cassandra here is a better guide than those who prophesy smooth things. The

increasing price of fuel is a premonition which we shall do well to heed. The probability of any important decrease in the consumption of wood no man can foresee. If the coal locomotives should prove economical, no doubt much less wood will be used for railway purposes, and iron may to some extent be substituted for wood in the construction of ships and houses. But on this we cannot build any calculation. The safer and more rational course is to meet the danger by the direct means of forest-planting. If half the money that is annually wasted in foolish speculations, or lost in the fluctuations of commerce, were turned to this work of renewing our forests, all the loss would be met by an equal gain. The pleadings of alarmists may seem extravagant, but in the end, we are confident, it will be proved that they were not too earnest or too early.

ART. VII.- Archæology of the United States; or, Sketches, Historical and Bibliographical, of the Progress of Information and Opinion respecting Vestiges of Antiquity in the United States. By SAMUEL F. HAVEN. Washington: Published by the Smithsonian Institution. New York: G. P. Putnam & Co. 1856. Large 4to. pp. 168.

MR. HAVEN Condenses into the narrow compass of his essay the history of more than three centuries of learning and folly, speculation and reasoning, fancy and fact, as to the antiquities of this country. The condensation is severe, - the result of years of study in this precise field. It is, of course, impossible for us to attempt a further compression, which should exhibit to the reader even what the unhappy newspaper reporters call "a sketch" of the discourse of the man, even more unhappy, whose words they distort and caricature. The book is itself an ultimate analysis; it is not to be analyzed further. It is a bibliographical study of the books on American antiquities, and a philosophical history of the results of various investigators. The author is almost too careful not VOL. LXXXV. - No. 176.

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