the wavy form of the fibres, offering a different figure in whatever direction it was viewed. A new species of mahogany has been lately introduced in cabinet-work, which is commonly called Gambia. As its name imports, it comes from Africa. It is of a beautiful colour, but does not retain it so long as the Spanish and Honduras woods. _Planting_. The publication of his Sylva, by Evelyn,[5] gave a considerable impulse to planting in the time of Charles II.; but in the next century that duty was much neglected by the landed proprietors of this country. There is a selfish feeling, that the planter of an elm or an oak does not reap such an immediate profit from it himself, as will compensate for the expense and trouble of raising it. This is an extremely narrow principle, which, fortunately, the rich are beginning to be ashamed of. It is a positive duty of a landed proprietor who cuts down a tree which his grandfather planted, to put a young one into the ground, as a legacy to his own grand-children: he will otherwise leave the world worse than he found it. Sir Walter Scott, who is himself a considerable planter, has eloquently denounced that contracted feeling which prevents proprietors thus improving their estates, because the profits of plantations make a tardy and distant return; and we cannot better conclude than with a short passage from the essay in which he enforces the duty of planting waste lands:-- "The indifference to this great rural improvement arises, we have reason to believe, not so much out of the actual lucre of gain as the fatal _vis inertiae_--that indolence which induces the lords of the soil to be satisfied with what they can obtain from it by immediate rent, rather than encounter the expense and trouble of attempting the modes of amelioration which require immediate expense--and, what is, perhaps, more grudged by the first-born of Egypt--a little future attention. To such we can only say that the improvement by plantation is at once the easiest, the cheapest, and the least precarious mode of increasing the immediate value, as well as the future income, of their estates; and that therefore it is we exhort them to take to heart the exhortation of the dying Scotch laird to his son: 'Be aye sticking in a tree Jock--it will be growing whilst you are sleeping.'"