As we have before stated, the timber of the beech-tree soon corrupts if it is not speedily dried, or kept in water after being cut down, and is equally liable to corruption in the tree when deprived of life by wounds or other injury. Beech has a matured and sap wood, although they are not very distinguishable, being nearly of one colour. The former has {49} considerable durability when kept dry, the latter is speedily consumed by worming. The planter of beech should procure the kind[10] with yellow-coloured wood, termed by joiners Yellow Beech, in opposition to the kind with white wood, called White Beech. The yellow grows faster and straighter, and is cleaner and freer of black knots, and also more pleasantly worked than the white, but it corrupts much sooner in the bark when cut down. This variety of beech, when properly trained, is probably the most profitable hard-wood that we can raise; when planked, it bends pleasantly under the shipwright to the curvature of the vessel’s side. The tree is also much superior in size and grace of outline to the white. There are few planters who need be put in mind that beech of small size, or of short or crooked stem, is the least valuable of all timber. Whoever plants with a view to profit will, therefore, throw in only as many beech plants as may ultimately be required for standards, and these in the bosom of plantations; as it is seldom that beech attains to much value in hedge-row or on the outskirts of woods, {50} from its proneness when so situated to ramify and grow crooked. It is, however, quite possible, with a little early attention, to rear beech as straight and clean as to be valuable, on the outskirts, where it forms a beautiful fringe to the plantation, and affords excellent shelter. ELM—_Ulmus._—BROAD-LEAVED, OR SCOTCH, or WYCH ELM—_Ulmus montana._ This beautiful and most graceful tree, whose favourite locality is the damp, deep, accumulated soil, free of stagnant water, at the bottom of declivities, is, together with its sister, the small-leaved kind, the English elm, when so situated, the fastest growing of our hard-wood trees. Both delight in easy or gravelly soils, though the small-leaved will also prosper in the more adhesive, the alluvial and diluvial clays.