which grew near Barr, is preserved in the Museum at Strasburg: its diameter was eight feet close to the ground, and the number of rings is said to amount to several hundreds.

Unfortunately this mode of determining a tree's age cannot be applied to a living tree; and it is only certain where the tree is sound at the heart. Where a tree has become hollow from old age, the rings near the centre, which constitute a part of the evidence of its duration, no longer exist. Hence the age of the great oak of Saintes, in the department of the Charente Inférieure, which measures twenty-three feet in diameter five feet from the ground, and is large enough to contain a small chamber, can only be estimated; and the antiquity of 1800 or 2000 years, which is assigned to it, must rest on an uncertain conjecture.

Decandolle lays it down that, of all European trees, the yew attains the greatest age; and he assigns an antiquity of thirty centuries to the Taxus baccata of Braburn in Kent; from twenty-five to thirty centuries to the Scotch yew of Fortingal; and fourteen and a half and twelve centuries respectively to those of Crowhurst in Surrey and Ripon (Fountains Abbey) in Yorkshire. These ages are fixed by a conjecture founded on the size, which can lead to no certain result.

Can any of your correspondents state what is the greatest number of rings which have been actually counted in any yew, or other tree, which has grown in the British Isles, or elsewhere? It Is only by actual enumeration that vegetable chronology can be satisfactorily determined: but if the rings in many trees were counted, some relation between the number of rings and the diameter of the trunk, for each species, might probably be laid down within certain limits. These rings, being annually deposited, form a natural chronicle of time, by which the age of a tree is determined with as much precision as the lapse of human events is determined by the cotemporaneous registration of annalists. Hence Milton speaks of "monumental oak." Evelyn, who has devoted a long chapter of his Silva to an investigation of the age of trees (b. iii. c. iii.), founds his inferences chiefly on their size; but he cites the following remark from Dr. Goddard:

"It is commonly and very probably asserted, that a tree gains a new ring every year. In the body of a great oak in the New Forest, cut transversely even, (where many of the trees are accounted to be some hundreds of years old) three and four hundred have been distinguished."—Vol. ii. p. 202. ed. Hunter.

A delineation and description of the largest and most celebrated trees of Great Britain may be seen in the interesting work of Jacob George Strutt, entitled Sylva Britannica, or Portraits of Forest Trees, distinguished for their Antiquity, Magnitude, or Beauty: London, 1822, folio.

The age of some trees is determined by historical records, in the same manner that we know the age of an ancient building, as the Parthenon, the Colosseum, or the Tower of London. It is, however, important that such historical evidence should be carefully scrutinised; for trees which are known to be of great antiquity sometimes give rise to fabulous legends, destitute of any foundation in fact. Such, for example, was the plane-tree near Caphyæ, in Arcadia, seen by Pausanias in the second century after Christ, which was reported by the inhabitants to have been planted by Menelaus when he was collecting the army for the expedition against Troy. (Paus. VIII. 23.) Such too, doubtless, was the oak of Mamre, where the angels were said to have appeared to Abraham. (Sozomen, ii. 3.) A rose-tree growing in the crypt of the cathedral of Hildesheim is referred, by a church-legend, to a date anterior to 1061; which would imply an age of more than 800 years, but the evidence adduced seems scarcely sufficient to identify the existing rose-tree with the rose-tree of 1061. (See Humboldt, p. 275.)

In other cases, however, the historical evidence extant, if not altogether free from doubt, is sufficient to carry the age of a tree back to a remote date. The Swilcar Lawn oak, in Needwood Forest, Staffordshire, is stated by Strutt, p. 2., "to be known by historical documents to be at this time [1822] six hundred years old; and it is still far from being in the last stage of decay." Of a great elm growing at Chipstead Place in Kent, he says: "Its appearance altogether savours enough of antiquity to bear out the tradition annexed to it, that in the time of Henry V. a fair was held annually under its branches; the high road from Rye in Sussex to London then passing close by it." (P. 5.) If this tradition be authentic, the elm in question must have been a large and wide-spreading tree in the years 1413-22. A yew-tree at Ankerwyke House, near Staines, is supposed to be of great antiquity. There is a tradition that Henry VIII. occasionally met Anne Boleyn under its branches: but it is not stated how high this tradition ascends. (Ib., p. 8.) The Abbot's Oak, near Woburn Abbey, is stated to derive its name from the fact that the abbot of the monastery was, by order of Henry VIII., hung from its branches in 1537. (Ib., p. 10.) But Query, is this an authentic fact?

There is a tradition respecting the Shelton Oak near Shrewsbury, that before the battle of Shrewsbury between Henry IV. and Hotspur, in 1403, Owen Glendower reconnoitred the field from its branches, and afterwards drew off his men. Positive documentary evidence, in the possession of Richard Hill Waring, Esq., is likewise cited, which shows that this tree was called "the Great Oak" in the year 1543 (Ib. p. 17.). There is a traditional account that the old yew-trees at Fountains Abbey existed at the foundation of the abbey, in the year 1132; but the authority for this tradition, and the time at which it was first recorded, is not stated. (P. 21.) The Abbot's Willow, near Bury St. Edmund's, stands on a part of the ancient demesne of the Abbot of Bury, and is hence conjectured to be anterior to the dissolution of the monastery in the reign of Henry VIII. (P. 23.) The Queen's Oak at Huntingfield, in Suffolk, was situated in a park belonging to Lord Hunsdon, where he had the honour of entertaining Queen Elizabeth. The queen is reported to have shot a buck with her own hand from this oak. (P. 26.) Sir Philip Sidney's Oak, near Penshurst, is said to have been planted at his birth, in 1554: it has been celebrated by Ben Jonson and Waller. This oak is above twenty-two feet in girth; it is hollow, and stag-headed; and, so far as can be judged from the engraving, has an appearance of great antiquity, though its age only reaches back to the sixteenth century. (P. 27.) The Tortworth Chestnut is described as being not only the largest, but the oldest tree in England: Evelyn alleges that "it continued a signal boundary to that manor in King Stephen's time, as it stands upon record;" but the date of the record is not mentioned. We can hardly suppose that it was cotemporaneous. (Ib. p. 29.) An elm at Chequers in Buckinghamshire is reported, by a tradition handed down in the families of the successive owners, to have been planted in the reign of Stephen. (Ib. p. 38.) Respecting the Wallace Oak, at Ellerslie near Paisley, it is reported that Sir William Wallace, and three hundred of his men, hid themselves among its branches from the English. This legend is probably fabulous; if it were true, it would imply that the tree was in its full vigour at the end of the thirteenth century. (Ib. p. 5.) The ash at Carnock, in Stirlingshire, supposed to be the largest in Scotland, and still a luxuriant tree, was planted about the year 1596, by Sir Thomas Nicholson of Carnock, Lord Advocate of Scotland in the reign of James VI. (Ib. p. 8.)

Marshall, in his Work on Planting and Rural Ornament