dred and forty years before had given shelter to the infancy of Romulus and Remus, began to wither in all its branches, and seemed threatened with total decay, which was considered ominous of future evil, but that it regained its former verdure. Pliny, in his memoranda of the Quercus Ilex (evergreen oak), mentions trees, growing in his time, of a greater age than Rome itself-trees which must have stood at that period for at least fourteen hundred years. Ovid, it will be remembered, speaks of the "mighty oak" which, in aged majesty, Towers o'er the subject trees, itself a grove. Of trees now remaining, the venerable cypress-tree at Somma, in Lombardy, which is a hundred and twenty-one feet in height, has a longer historical existence than any other tree of which we have read, if it be true that the chronicle at Milan, referred to by the Abbé Belize, shews it to have been standing in the time of Julius Cæsar. The tradition of the place, however, is, that it was planted in the year of the birth of Christ, on which account it is reverenced by the inhabitants, and was spared by Napoleon himself when he laid down the plan of his great road over the Simplon. We are not aware of any other existing trees to which either history or tradition assigns a greater age than twelve hundred years, but there are many which are estimated by naturalists to be much older, as will be noticed presently. Apropos of existing continental trees with historical associations, we may mention here the old orange-tree in the Orangery at Versailles, known under the three names of Grande Connétable, François I., and Grande Bourbon, but this royally descended as well as titled tree seems quite overshadowed when compared with the venerable cypress of Lombardy. However, it is more than four hundred years old, and has a curious history, which we believe is to the following effect: It comes from some pippins of a tree of bitter oranges planted at the commencement of the fifteenth century by Eleanor of Castile, wife of Charles III., King of Navarre. The trees raised were preserved, down to A.D. 1499, at Pampeluna, and afterwards passed to different owners as rare and precious objects, and at length to the Constable de Bourbon, who kept them at his Château de Chantelle, in the Bourbonnais, until 1522, when, on the confiscation of his property, the orangetrees were sent to decorate the palace of Fontainebleau, then restored and enlarged by François I. In 1684, when Louis XIV. had finished Versailles and its magnificent Orangery, he collected there all the orange-trees preserved in the royal residences; and accordingly the time-honoured orange-trees of Pampeluna, then two centuries and a half old, were ultimately removed to Versailles. The Grande Connétable, the most remarkable of them, is still quite vigorous.* The fine orange-trees in the public pleasure-gardens at Gotha are probably known to many of our readers. Some of these trees are said to be three hundred years old. Fer The ancient Oak of Guernica is mentioned by Laborde, in his account of Biscay, as a most venerable natural monument. dinand and Isabella, in the year 1476, after they had heard mass in the church of Sta. Maria de la Antigua, repaired to this tree, under which they swore to the Biscayans to maintain their privileges. But in various parts of the world there are trees now standing, which, if not dignified by historical associations, were flourishing trees almost before European history began. Humboldt considers the Dragon tree of Orotava in Teneriffe to be a thousand years old. It is said to have been in 1402 as large and hollow as he found it late in the eighteenth century. The Olive treet at Pessio, regarded as the oldest tree of the kind in Italy, is said by Maschettini to have attained the age of seven hundred years; and near Nice there is an olive-tree which is considered to be of much greater age. Then, too, there is that venerable tree near Saintes, in the maritime department of the Lower Charente, which Mr. Digby regards as the oldest oak in Europe and the largest, and which is supposed to be two thousand years old-an age * Ex relatione Galignani's Correspondent, July, 1855. The Olive still loves its paternal soil in Palestine. It is still found, as Dr. E. Clarke remarks, on the spots where it flourished eleven hundred years before Christ. greater even than that of the venerable cypress of Somma. Many of the oldest trees are yews. Monsieur de Candolle computed the average yearly increase of the yew in bulk at about a twelfth of an inch; and, applying this rate to the three most famous trees of this kind in Britain, estimated their ages at twelve hundred and fourteen, twelve hundred and eighty-seven, and two thousand eight hundred and eighty years respectively. The first of these estimates refers to the oldest of the well known yew-trees at Fountains Abbey, which is one of a group that must have been of considerable magnitude seven hundred years ago, when the monks who had migrated from their Benedictine House at York were sheltered by the thick foliage while building their monastery. These yew-trees were originally seven in number, and all are of extraordinary size. The trunk of one of them is nearly twenty-seven feet in circumference at three feet from the ground. A very exact scrutiny is, however, required in making the number and distances of the concentric zones observable in a transverse section of old trees a measure of duration, but Monsieur de Candolle's principle has been approved by other botanists; and applying it to certain trees in Mexico and Senegal specified in his "Physiologie Végétale," their age was estimated at no less than four thousand years! Mr. Digby mentions a cedar on one of the mountains of Calaveras, in California, that must be two thousand five hundred years old; but this venerable tree, we are told, is surpassed in age by that patriarchal family of gigantic trees which stand on a plateau of the Sierra Nevada, about four thousand five hundred feet above the level of San Francisco, some of which have been pronounced, on the evidence of concentric rings, to be contemporary with Moses and Pharaoh. We call these mammoth trees a "family," for they form a grove of eighty-five trees growing in an area of fifty acres. Several of them attain a height exceeding three hundred feet, and the largest in the grove is a hundred and seven feet in circumference. One of them was recently felled, and the stump, which is twenty-five feet in diameter, having been made smooth as a floor, visitors have dined and danced on this extraordinary table. Its age is considered to be not less than three thousand years. The specimen of the Wellingtonia gigantea, recently set up in the Crystal Palace, with the bark taken from one of these gigantic "Sons of the Snow," affords some idea of their symmetry and grandeur.* England cannot boast such patriarchal trees as these; but there are some ancient monarchs of the wood, especially among our majestic oaks, that saw not only mail-clad Normans but painted Britons-trees that were giants on the earth in the days of Alfred and Athelstan, and are giants still. Although Druidical rites are no longer celebrated in the kindred gloom of these old oaks, they stand as landmarks of history and human memories, like the grey church-towers of England. And our hereditary trees, standing fenced round by parks and cultivated grounds, of which they are the celebrities and the pride, seem, like most of their noble owners, to blend antique stability with modern grace; and, full of a patrician dignity, the very types of steadfastness and duration, loving society, yet secluded from a crowd, they form the sylvan aristocracy of the land, and a chief glory of Nature. From the forest of royal Windsor (said to have been formerly a hundred and twenty miles in circumference), to the remote remains of the ancient forest of Caledonia, most of the old woodlands of Britain can boast stately aged trees, conspicuous among which THE OAK still grows in all its native magnificence of form and size, attaining in many instances an age supposed to be not less than a thousand years: The Eucalyptus or Gum * Among trees remarkable for gigantic size we should not omit the Larch that stood near Matsch in the Vintschgan, in one of the Styrian forests, known as the King of the Larches, the trunk of which could hardly be spanned by seven men with outstretched arms. But the Old World has no trees so gigantic as the New World can boast. tree, near the base of Mount Wellington, in Tasmania, almost rivals the mammoth trees of California, in regard to size, inasmuch as its height is stated to be 250 feet and its diameter thirty. Some interesting particulars descriptive of the Californian trees were published in the Gardener's Chronicle, in 1856, by Mr. Thomas Banister, of the Inner Temple, who visited the mammoth grove. Whimsical names have been given to some of them, Ex. gr., the "Father," the "Mother," the "Husband and Wife," the "Three Sisters," the "Family Group," the "Old Bachelor," and the "Old Maid" (forlorn looking trees of course), the "Hermit," the "Twins," &c. Some magnificent Baobab trees (Adansonia digitata) or Mowanas grow on the banks of Lake Ngami in Southern Africa. One of them is 76 feet in girth. The monarch oak, the patriarch of trees, Supreme in state; and in three more decays. The history of the oak, whether natural or traditional, is (as Professor Burnett justly remarks) replete with interest; and the reverence in which the tree was held, the oracles sought from it of old by the Druidic priesthood, as well as the superstitions connected with it in other ages and various countries, all tend to combine the annals of the oak with the history of the human race. Of the antiquity of the oak in the British islands, and the enormous size which our indigenous oaks attained, we have evidence in buried remains of the ancient forests which overspread England in the Anglo-Saxon days. Several of these pre-historic oaks have been found in different places. Beneath Hatfield Chase (for example) the solid trunk of an oak was found which measured thirty-six feet in girth, and was computed to have been originally more than a hundred feet in height. Similar but less gigantic trunks have been found on the banks of northern rivers of England, and, in one or two instances, amongst the remains of those forests which seem to have been overwhelmed in some irruption of the sea, and are now below the general level of the coast. Other oaks, that were probably contemporaries of the Ottadini and the Brigantes, were standing north of Humber until comparatively recent times, when, being wholly decayed, they were cut down. Notices of many such trees may also be found in the histories of midland and western counties. Dr. Plot mentions one at Rycote, in Oxfordshire, under the boughs of which four thousand men might have stood; but this is surely an impossible number. The trunk of the great oak at Norbury measured fortyfive feet in girth; the Boddington oak was even larger; and the great hollow tree, known as "Damory's Oak," in Dorsetshire, cut down in 1775, was sixty-eight feet in circumference. The Golynos oak, which stood near Newport, in Monmouthshire, and the Fairlop oak-long a venerable celebrity of its native forest— have disappeared more recently. But we can boast some millennial and equally gigantic trees |