THE AGE OF TREES. 59 



Sergeant Newdigate ; and one tree of his planting was thirteen feet 

 round when Evelyn measured it eighty-one years afterward. A com- 

 parison of the statistics of growth, as above collected with reference 

 to the oak, indicates with respect to most trees a more rapid rate than 

 is commonly supposed. Let us test the claims of some of the oldest 

 limes. The Swiss used often to commemorate a victory by planting a 

 lime-tree, so that it may be true that the lime still in the square of 

 Fribourg was planted on the day of their victory over Charles the 

 Bold at Morat in 1476. A youth, they say, bore it as a twig into the 

 town, and arriving breathless and exhausted from the battle had only 

 strength to utter the word " Victory ! "' before he fell down dead. But 

 this tree was only thirteen feet nine inches in 1831, i. e., three hundred 

 and fifty-five years afterward, and it would be extraordinary if a lime 

 had not attained in that period greater bulk than even an oak might 

 have reached in a century. The large lime at Neustadt, in Wurtem- 

 berg, mentioned by Evelyn as having its boughs supported by columns 

 of stone, was twenty-seven feet when he wrote (1664), and in 1837 it 

 was fifty-four, so that within a period of one hundred and seventy- 

 three years it had gained as much as twenty-seven feet. Conse- 

 quently, making allowance for diminished growth, we may fairly 

 assume that two hundred years would have been more than enough 

 for the attainment of the circumference of the first twenty-seven feet 

 which it had reached in the time of Evelyn. No English lime appears 

 to have reached such dimensions as would imply a growth of more 

 than three centuries, though the lime at Depeham, near Norwich, 

 which was forty-six feet when Sir Thomas Browne sent his account of 

 it to Evelyn, sufficiently dispels the legend that all limes in this coun- 

 try have come from two plants brought over by Sir John Spelman, 

 who introduced the manufacture of paper into England from Ger- 

 many, and to whom Queen Elizabeth granted the manor of Port- 

 bridge. 



It would be natural to expect the greatest longevity in indigenous 

 trees, and, though it has been much disputed what kinds are native to 

 the English soil, etymology alone would indicate that the following 

 trees were of Roman importation : the elm (idmus), the plane (pla- 

 tanus), the poplar (populus), the box (buxus), the chestnut (castanea). 

 The yew, on the contrary, is probably indigenous, though its opponents 

 find some. reason for their skepticism in the fact that its larger speci- 

 mens are chiefly found in church-yards and artificial plantations. In 

 favor of its claim is the fact that its pretensions to longevity seem to 

 be better founded than those of any other English tree, not even ex- 

 cluding the oak. A yew that was dug up from a bog in Queen's 

 County was proved by its rings to have been five hundred and forty- 

 five years of age ; yet for the last three hundred years of its life it had 

 grown so slowly that near the circumference one hundred rings were 

 traceable within an inch. Some great and sudden change for the worse 



