1885.] HISTORICAL NOTICE OF CELEBRATED TREES. 165 



HISTORICAL NOTICE OF SOME CELEBRATED TREES. 



BY THE LATE PROFESSOlt WALKER AEXOTT, M.D. 



Part II. — The Yew and the Pine. 

 The Yew. 



THE yew, Taoms haccata, if it does not attain to a great height, 

 boasts of no inconsiderable bulk, and its perennial verdure, 

 hardness of wood, its incorruptibility, exceeding slow growth, are so 

 very striking characteristics as to point it out at once as an emblem 

 and an example of immortality. Its branches were therefore 

 employed by our ancestors in the north, in place of the cypress, to 

 deck the gi-aves of the dead, and for other sacred purposes. It 

 attains a very great age. De Candolle says that he counted 

 on a trunk only i- foot thick, 71 layers or rings of wood. 

 Oehlafeu counted 1 .5 layers in a trunk 1 .3 inches in diameter ; and 

 Veillard 280 layers in a section of only 2 inches diameter. From 

 these De Candolle drew the conclusion that the trunk of the yew 

 increases in diameter about one line — French measure, the 1-1 2th 

 of an inch — during the first 150 years, and rather less than | of a 

 line for the ensuing 130 years. Hence he proposed to estimate the 

 age of ancient yews by assuming a line per annum as their average 

 growth in diameter. Their age would in this way be readily 

 computed by measuring their circumference, and thence obtaininfi^ 

 their radius in lines ; the tree being reckoned as many years old as 

 there are lines in diameter. Since all trees grow the more slowly 

 as they advance in years, this estimate ought even to be corrected, 

 making the trees still older than as calculated by De Candolle ; but 

 this, it must be confessed, leads to some startling conclusions. The 

 computed age of the famous yews of Fountains Abbey, near Piipon 

 in Yorkshire, is to a great extent sustained by the history of the 

 abbey itself, as chronicled by Hugh, a monk of Kirkstall, whose 

 narrative is still preserved, it is said, in the library of the Eoyal 

 Society. This monastery, the noble ruins of which are now over- 

 looked by the venerable trees that beheld its erection, was founded 

 in the year 1132 by Thurstau, Archbishop of York, for certain 

 monks, whose consciences being too tender to allow them to indulge 

 in the relaxed habits of their own order, made them desirous of 

 adopting the more rigid rule of the Cistertiaus, then recently intro- 

 duced into England. " At Christmas, therefore," says Burton, " the 

 archbishop being at Eipou, assigned to these monks some land in 



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