London, his Majesty's gardener, and be certifies that to
put the garden and plantations in as good repair as they
were in before his Czarish Majesty resided there, will
require the sum of fifty-five pounds.

GEORGE LONDON.

Great damages are done to the trees and plants,
which cannot be repaired, as the breaking the branches
of the wall-fruit trees, spoiling two or three of the
finest true phillereas, breaking several hollys and other
fine plants.

Any inroad of the Czar Nicholas and all
the Russias upon Europe would leave Europe
much as the Czar Peter and his retinue left
the house and garden at Deptford of the
learned and refined John Evelyn. I can hear
the laugh of Peter, as with brute force,
stimulated by drink, he drove the wheelbarrow,
with Prince Menzikoff upon it, into
the prickly holly hedge, five feet in thickness.

LONDON STONES.

HAMMERING at the Alps, when there is a
wallet to be filled with geological specimens
in London streets, is scarcely worth the while
of any amateur stone-pecker who lives within
sound of Bow bells. I understand going in
search of Alpine breezes, studying physical
geography abroad, fossil hunting, stratum
stalking, but I should hardly think of quitting
London to collect diversities of rock. Of that
sort of geology, why may I not have any fill
between Cheapside and Piccadilly?

To begin at the beginning, without climbing
a mountain, I can see where the granite crops
out, beyond the kerb of every pavement. The
metropolitan police may object to a free use of
the hammer, but even if no cart-wheel ever
chipped us off a specimen, it is a blessed
institution of the metropolis that roads or
pavements are perpetually being taken up;
and he is a wonderful man whose lot it never
has been to get a specimen of granite in his
eye, chipped from the mass by some one of
an army of men licensed to use hammer and
chisel. You may go to Switzerland or Norway,
travel over miles, and see only one sort
of granite. Here, in London, you have specimens
of almost every sort. In chips of every
form and colour, you may admire the spangles
of the mica and the very many sorts of granite
pudding made by sundry mixtures of the
felspar and the quartz. With granite, geology
begins; upon that hard, crystalline rock, our
solid earth all lies a-bed. It has been molten
once, and has cooled into a crystalline form;
of it, as well as porphyry, sienite and basalt,
there are innumerable specimens to be had in
the streets of London. We take an omnibus
at the Bank for Paddington, and rumble over
stones that were all prepared in the furnace
millions of years before Cheapside was
thought about, or indeed before Britannia's
head was fairly above water.

Then, of the slate rocks that rest upon the
granite, we have a most ample representation
on the roofs of houses. Wherever there is a
house being built, the seeker of slate is saved
a trip to Wicklow or North Wales, and may
fill his pocket with a class of rocks several
thousands of feet thick, that naturally rise to
a great elevation, and by their broken, serrated
outlines, give peculiar beauty to the
scenery of which they form a part.

The geological deposits of London are not
governed by the same laws that regulate
the depositions of the strata in the common
course of nature. Here the first may be
last and the last first, the granite overlie
the clay, and such reversal of the usual
order of things has been produced by no
movements within the bowels of the earth,
but by movements on its surface, commonly
effected by the agency of water, wind, steam,
and animal traction, brought into full play
by the requirements of a crowded population.
If there be a useful purpose to which the
rock formation of any geological period can
be economically applied, it is sure to be
deposited in London, irrespective of any order
of nature to the contrary; but if otherwise,
the geological student may safely make up
his mind that it will not be found. For this
reason it is not easy to get specimens in London
streets of the rocks which naturally overlie
the primary— the transition rocks— which
set out with Sir Roderick Murchison's
silurian system. They are at home in England
on the south-east borders of North Wales,
where they reside constantly, and never come
to town. They are the country cousins of the
stones of London. But of the old red sandstone
rocks, the Devonian, the coal, the new
red sandstone, the magnesian limestones,
which are the strata next following in order,
we get numerous examples. Door-steps,
landings, aud many miles of London pavement
are composed of a great artificial stratum of
the carboniferous sandstone from Craigleith,
and other parts of Scotland. In no place in
the world are there to be found a greater
number of the varieties of coal, or more
people actively engaged in soliciting public
attention to their respective qualities. Fragment
of lias are much less abundant, though
they may be found in lapidaries' yards, chippped
from the blocks used by lithographers,
while of the oolitic series, which lies above,
the specimens are splendid. Of the roe-stone,
which comes among the stones of London as
a friend from Bath, the new facing to Henry
the Seventh's chapel, at Westminster, is a
pretty specimen, but it looks worn, though
its age is under thirty. Specimens of this
Bath limestone may be had in the neighbourhood
of several new buildings, and more
specimens are to be found of another and a
finer limestone brought to us from the Isle of
Portland. St. Paul's Cathedral, Somerset
House, and the Reform Club, are good specimens
of this last. The curious observer may
also study the effect of London air and smoke
on stone. Some carved fragments meant to
be worked into St. Paul's Cathedral have