ready access. In 1819, a very productive year, Williamson obtained from 57 trees, mostly not above six years old, and growing on 360 square yards of ground, 2 cwt. of nuts. To obtain a good tree, the practice in Kent is to select a stout upright shoot 3 feet in length; this is cut down to about 18 inches, of which the lower 12 are kept free from outgrowth. The head is pruned to form six or eight strong offsets ; and by judicious use of the knife, and by training, preferably on a hoop placed within them, these are caused to grow outwards and upwards to a height of about 6 feet, so as to form a bowl-like shape. Excessive luxuriance of the laterals may be combated by root-pruning, or by checking them early in the season, and again later, and by cutting back to a female blossom bud, or else spurring nearly down to the main branch in the following spring. In certain conditions of growth the trees may bear almost exclusively male or female flowers, and those produced im the first blossoming are stated (Gent. Mag., 1788, vol. Iviii., pt. 1, p. 495) to be female only. The fertilization of the latter may be secured by suspending amongst them a branch with
male bloom.
Filbert nuts required for keeping must be gathered only when quite ripe; they may then be preserved in dry sand, or, after drying, by packing with a sprinkling of salt in sound casks or new flower- pots. Their different forms include the Cosford, which are thin- shelled and oblong; the Downton, or large square nut, having a lancinated husk; the white or Wrotham Park filbert; and the red hazel or filbert, the kernel of which has a red pellicle. The last two, on account of their elongated husk, were by Willdenow distin- guished as a species, under the name Corylus tubulosa. Like these, apparently, were the nuts of Abella, or Avella, in the Campania (cf. Fr. aveline, filbert), said by Pliny to have been originally designated
- “Pontic,” from their introduction into Asia and Greece ‘from
Pontus (see Nat. Hist., xv. 24, xxiii. 78). Cob-nuts are short and roundish, and have a thick and strong shell. Hazel-nuts, under the name of Barcelona or Spanish nuts, are largely exported from France and Portugal, and especially Tarragona and other places in Spain. They afford 60 per cent. of a colourless or pale-yellow, sweet- tasting, non-drying oil, which has a specific gravity of 0°92 nearly, becomes solid at -—19° C. (Cloez), and consists approximately of earbon 77, and hydrogen and oxygen each 11°5 per cent. Hazel nuts formed part of the food of the ancient lake-dwellers of Swit- zerland and other countries of Europe (see Keller, Lake Dwellings, trans. Lee, 2d ed., 1878). By the Romans they were sometimes eaten roasted. Kaltenbach (Pfanzenfeinde, pp. 633-38, 1874) enumerates ninety-cight insects which attack the hazel. Among these the beetle Palaninus nucun, L., the nut-weevil, seen on hazel and oak stems from the end of May till July, is highly destructive to the nuts. The female lays an egg in the unripe nut, on the kernel of which the larva subsists till September, when it bores its way through the shell, and enters the earth, to undergo transformation into a chry- salis in the ensuing spring. The leaves of the hazel arc frequently found mined on the upper and under side respectively by the larvx of the moths Lithocolletis coryli, Nic., and ZL. Nicclii, Sta. The tomtit has been observed to pass over the filbert whilst destroying other nuts (Darwin, Anim. and Pl., ii. 231). Parasitic on the roots of the hazcl is found the curious leafless Lathrea squamosa, or Toothwort, of the natural order Orobanchacea.
The Hebrew word luz, translated ‘ hazel”? in the authorized version of the English Bible (Gen. xxx. 37), is believed to signify ‘almond ” (see Kitto, Cycl. of Bibl. Lit., ii. 869, and iii. 811, 1864). A belief in the efficacy of divining-rods of hazel for the discovery of concealed objects is probably of remote origin (cf. Hosea, iv. 12). G. Agricola, in his treatise Vom Bergiwerck (pp. Xxix.-xxxi, Basel, 1557), gives an account, accompanied by a woodcut, of their em- ployment in searching for mineral veins. By certain persons, who for different metals used rods of various materials, rods of hazel, he says, were held serviceable simply for silver lodes, and by the skilled miner, who trusted to natural signs of mineral veins, they were regarded as of no avail at all. The virtue of the hazel wand was supposed to be dependent on its having two forks; these were to be grasped in the fists, with the fingers uppermost, but with moderate firmness only, lest the frce motion of the opposite end downwards towards the looked-for object should be interfered with. According to Cornish tradition, the divining or dowsing rod is guded to lodes by the pixies, the guardians of the treasures of the earth. By Vallemont, who wrote towards the end of the 17th century, the divining-rod of hazel, or ‘baguette divinatoire,” is described as instrumental in the pursuit of criminals. The Jesuit Vaniére, who flourished in the early part of the 18th century, in the Pradium Rusticum (pp. 12,18, new ed., Toulonse, 1742) amusingly relates the manner in which he exposed the chicanery of one who pretended by the aid of a hazel divining-rod to point out hidden water-courses and gold. The burning of hazel nuts for the magical investigation of the future is alluded to by Gay in Thu7s- day, or the Spell, and by Burns in Hulloween. The hazel is very frequently mentioned by the old French romance writers. The Corylus rostrata and americana of North America have edible fruits like those of C. Avellana. The Witch Hazel is the species Hamamelis virginica (see vol. ii. p. 320), of the natural order Hamamelidec, the astringent bark of which is used in medicine.
See Loudon, Arboretum, iii. 2016 seg.; Gardener's Chron., 1850, pp. 101 and 552; C. M‘Intosh, The Book of the Garden, ii. 5638, 1855; Syme, Sowerdy's Ena. Bot., viii. 170, 1868; Masters, Vegetable Teratology, Ray Soc., 1869; J. D. Hooker, Student's Flora, pp. 363-4, 2d ed., 1878.
HAZEL-HEN. See Grouse.
HAZLETON, a post-borough of Luzerne county, Pennsylvania, U.S., is situated about 80 miles N.N.W. of Philadelphia. Owing to its elevated and healthy situa- tion, its agreeable climate, and the facilities afforded by its railway connexions with other districts, it has become a favourite and fashionable health-resort in summer. The manufactures include both iron and timber; and a part of the rolling-stock of the Lehigh Valley Railway is male in the town. There are several valuable coal- niines in the vicinity. The population in 1860 was only 1707 ; in 1870 it was 4317, and since then it has con- siderably increased.
eminent of English critics, was born April 10, 1778, at Maidstone, where his father was minister of the Presby- terian congregation. He was educated privately, and after- wards at the Unitarian College at Hackney, where he first began to speculate upon metaphysical subjects. Feeling disinclined to enter the dissenting ministry, he returned to Wem in Shropshire, where his father had in the meantime settled, and there led an idle and desultory life until, about 1802, he determined upon becoming a painter. Meta- physics and art continued his joint passion throughout his life. It was his singular lot to be animated by an equal enthusiasm for two of the most dissimilar fields of human effort, in neither of which was he capable of achieving eminence, and yet, by a combination of the qualities proper to both, to obtain the most distinguished success in another sphere which he only entered by accident. The secret of his distinction as a critic is the union in him of the meta- phlysician’s acuteness with the painter’s eye for colour and substance. Nowhere else is abstract thought so pictur- esquely bodied forth by concrete illustration. He com- menced the practice of painting in London, where his elder brother had already acquired some reputation as an artist, and soon found his way into literary and artistic circles, be- coming especially intimate with Lamb, Hunt, and Godwin. Previously to this he had (January 1798) been powerfully influenced by Coleridge, who had come to preach in his father’s neighbourhood, and of whose conversation and general demeanour he has left a most vivid picture. His professional painting did not prosper, and little remains of it except a few portraits; but in 1805 he published his Essay on the Principles of Tuman Action, which had occupied him at intervals for six or seven years. This work, further defined by the author as an argument in favour of the natural disinterestedness of the human mind, was preferred by him to all his other writings, but never attracted any attention from the public. In 1807 appeared a most useful abridgment of Abraham Tucker's Light of Nature Pursued, and a clever but fallacious attempt to invalidate the natural law established in Malthus’s Lssay on Population. In the following year he married Sarah, sister of Dr Stoddart, well known for his connexion with the journalism of the day, a woman of literary tastes and great strength of character, but cold, formal, and utterly uncongenial to him. No man indeed could well be less adapted for domestic life than Hazlitt, whose habits, not-
withstanding his exemplary sobriety, were most irregular,
