Our author advises the cutting off the upper part of spruce-trees on the outside of plantations, in order that their lower branches may extend the more, and remain vigorous,—thence affording more adequate shelter to the within plantation. Perhaps it is quite unnecessary to guard any person from practising this piece of folly. On the outside of woods, spruce-firs {146} will retain the branches in vigour, sufficiently low for all the purposes of shelter: nothing could be more unseemly than the decapitated trees; and in a few years most of them would become rotted in the stem, die, and fall down. From observing, on the western side of Scotland, thriving plantations exposed to south-west winds and sea-spray, and also to north-east winds and sea-spray, in woods extending along the western side of the salt lochs in Argyllshire, our author predicts, that, under his panacea of repeated cutting down, trees would grow luxuriantly in exposed situations on the north-eastern margin of our island. We do not desire to see Mr Monteath’s sanguine hope turned to disappointment, which a trial would certainly effect. There is something peculiarly hard and cutting in our _vernal_ north-eastern breeze fresh from ocean, which withers up the tender spreading leaves of every plant raised from the ground, and placed in its immediate draught. This is occasioned as well by a cold moist, as by a cold dry wind, the new vegetable structure in the developing process, when the tissues of tubes and cells are only in the state of pulp, and all the molecular germs floating into figure, under the direction of vital and chemical impulses and attractions, being very susceptible {147} of derangement. We attribute this effect on vegetables principally to the coldness and saline matter. The depressing effect on the spirits or vital energy of man, occasioned by the eastern breeze, does not appear to be dependent on the same cause. The great rivers, the Rhine, the Weser, the Elbe, independent of the English rivers, throw a great quantity of decaying vegetable matter into the lower part of the German sea, which, being there only a shallow muddy gulf, may thence have its waters so far contaminated as to throw off pernicious exhalations. Or, what is much more probable, the eastern breeze, sweeping along the swamps (at this time in high evaporation, of malaria) which extend from Holland upward, and along the whole southern shore of the Baltic, and thence eastward nobody knows how far, must bear these exhalations, uncorrected, over the narrow sea which intervenes between these flats and our shores. It is even likely that a slight diffusion of saline matter from this gulf, instead of correcting, may have the opposite effect, as a small quantity of salt tends to promote putrefaction. It is evident that this miasma-atmosphere, borne across the German sea, is not pernicious to vegetables; as, when the breeze is not too cold, or too violent, they