well as the Veneti, making use of the willow, whereof Lucan,

When Sicoris to his own banks restor'd,
Had quit the field, of twigs, and willow-board
They build small craft, cover'd with bullocks-hide,
In which they reach'd the rivers farther side:
So sail the Veneti if Padus flow,
The Britains sail on their rough ocean so.{142:1}

Also for fuel: In many of the mosses in the West-Riding of Yorkshire,
are often dug up birch-trees, that burn and flame like firr and
candle-wood; and I think Pliny says the Gaules extracted a sort of
bitumen out of birch: Great and small coal, are made by the charring of
this wood; (see Book III Chap. 4. of fuel) as of the tops and loppings,
Mr. Howard's new tanne. The inner white cuticle and silken-bark, (which
strips off of it self almost yearly) was anciently us'd for
writing-tables, even before the invention of paper; of which there is a
birch-tree in Canada, whose bark will serve to write on, and may be made
into books, and of the twigs very pretty baskets; with the outward
thicker and courser part of the common birch, are divers houses in
Russia, Poland, and those poor northern tracts cover'd, instead of
slates and tyle: Nay, one who has lately publish'd an account of
Sweden,{142:2} says, that the poor people grind the very bark of
birch-trees, to mingle with their bread-corn. 'Tis affirm'd by Cardan,
that some birch-roots are so very extravagantly vein'd, as to represent
the shapes and images of beasts, birds, trees, and many other pretty
resemblances. Lastly, of the whitest part of the old wood, found
commonly in doating birches, is made the grounds of our effeminate
farin'd gallants sweet powder; and of the quite consum'd and rotten
(such as we find reduc'd to a kind of reddish earth in superannuated
hollow-trees) is gotten the best mould for the raising of divers
seedlings of the rarest plants and flowers; to say nothing here of the
magisterial _fasces_ for which anciently the cudgels were us'd by the
_lictor_, for lighter faults, as now the gentler rods by our tyrannical
paedagogues.

3. I should here add the uses of the water too, had I full permission to
tamper with all the medicinal virtues of trees: But if the sovereign
effects of the juice of this despicable tree supply its other defects
(which make some judge it unworthy to be brought into the catalogue of
woods to be propagated) I may perhaps for once, be permitted to play the
empiric, and to gra