Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SCOTCH FIR. 35 and overpowering a smell, and which forms one of the principal ingredients in the paint which is used for our houses, gates, and palings. Pitch and tar, so invaluable in securing the crevices and joints of ships, and preserving the rigging and external parts from the effects of moisture, are obtained from the common Scotch Fir; which also produces that useful wood called deal, with which rooms are floored and houses chiefly constructed. Rosin, burgundy-pitch, frankincense, lampblack, shoemaker's wax, and the essence from which spruce-beer is made, are all obtained by different and curious processes from these several trees. L. This class is not indeed likely to be forgotten, dear mamma; for I think not one of the others you have described can compare with it in usefulness or importance. M. To enumerate all, or even a small portion, of its valuable contents, my love, would 36 EXOTICS IN MONCECIA. fill a little volume; and we have already devoted so much time to it, that I fear I must only very briefly allude to its foreign productions, in which it is fully as rich and abundant; for the breadfruit-tree1 and the cocoa-nut,2 the plane-tree3 and the cypress,4 the cabbage- tree5 and the betel-nut,6 the tallow-tree7 and the castor-oil plant,8 the acuba9 and arbor vita),10 as well as the shrub11 whose root produces tapioca, are all included in different orders of this class; so too is that delicious fruit the mulberry,12 which is a native of Asia: you know your brother gathers its leaves for his silkworms. That most singular substance, the Indian rubber,13 is the produce of a glossy- 1 Artoca'rpus inci'sa. Co'cos nuci'fera. Pla'tanus orienta'lis. Cupre'ssus sempervi'rens. Are'ca olera'cea. Are'ca ca'techu. f Stilli'ngia sebi'ferum. 8 Ri'cinus comm...