About the Book
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1835. Excerpt: ... DIFFERENT SORTS OF TIMBER TREES. As Mr. Longhurst had travelled, and seen many of those trees abroad, of which others of us had only been able to obtain representations and descriptions, I was requested still to lead the conversation respecting British timber trees; and reserve the account of foreign woods for him. "There are," I said, when we next met, "about twenty-five different sorts of timber trees grown in Britain, for the varied occasions of man. These are, the Oak, the Ash, the Aspen, the Elm, the Beech, the Lime, the Chestnut, the Walnut, the Sycamore, the Poplar, the Plane, the Maple, the Hornbeam, the Pine, the Larch, the Spruce Fir, the Lancewood, the Holly, the Box, the Yew, the Willow, the common and weeping Mountain Ash, the Birch, the Hazel, and the Alder." "How beautiful," observed Mr. Longhurst, "and how accurately adapted, not only to man's necessities, but to his comforts and luxuries, is this store of materials, which the Creator has provided! It would have been doing much to have supplied us with Oak, with Iron, and with one sort of Stone: but God, having given to man the inclination and the power to find out 'witty inventions, ' and endued his hand. and head with skill to execute them, has also provided an almost endless variety of substances, with infinitely varied properties, on which that invention, skill, and ability, might be exercised, to produce the multiplied blessings of civilized life." "And I think," said Mrs. Heathfield, "that those persons err greatly, who, losing sight of this grand display of Almighty power and beneficence, and, forgetting the purpose for which the ability given to man must have been designed, would leave all unemployed, and contemn, as some well-meaning persons do, many of the useful and nearly all th...
