EEV. DR. GEE — FAMOUS TREES IN HERTFORDSHIRE. 3 



Westminster Hall. The old wood is so far unlike our modern notion 

 of oak timber, particularly in the absence or indistinctness of the 

 silver grain, that it was long considered to have been chestnut. 

 Now, the distinction which I have just laid down seems to be re- 

 cognised and to entitle this old timber to be called oak. I may 

 mention here that at the hospital of St. Cross, near Winchester, I 

 myself saw oak of a very singular, dark grain. The brother who 

 " showed me round " told me that it was considered a specialty, and 

 that a visitor had offered much money to be allowed to take it out 

 and replace it. He added that the peculiar grain was commonly 

 attributed to the way in which the wood was cut. The extreme 

 length of each plank was only five feet and it might all have been 

 cut crossways. 



A natural question arises at once with, regard to the oak, viz., as 

 to its extreme age. I mean as to the age which it would attain if 

 left to itself, or as to the age of some patriarch of our own acquain- 

 tance. I do not see how this can be ascertained except by docu- 

 ments, and documents will not go back as far as we desire. 

 Granted that an oak marks its growth by natural indications, yet 

 when growth ceases, these indications stop. I^ot to be irreverent, 

 an old oak is like an old horse with the teeth-marks " gone out of 

 his mouth " as the ostler would express it. I cannot tell upon 

 what grounds the Salcy Forest Oak in Northamptonshire is so con- 

 fidently pronounced to be 1,500 years old. We can make no 

 experiments you know for ourselves in this direction, unless you 

 would repeat the failure of the good old lady, who, having heard 

 that a tortoise would live 100 years, bought a young specimen 

 that she might judge for herself.* I conclude that the only 

 approach to investigation would be to notice carefully the growth 

 of an oak still growing, and to calculate in what time, propor- 

 tionally, an old oak would have attained its girth, and then to 

 allow a proportionate time for decay. Of course this growth 

 would vary much from relation to soil and aspect ; still something 

 may be done in this way. Our Lord Lieutenant, a lover of trees 

 and an observer long before I took up the subject, has most kindly 

 entered into my endeavours to interest you to-night. He has given 

 me his experience with regard to trees at Gorhambury. He 

 summarises his conclusions as being, that an oak increases in girth f 

 half-an-inch per annum, and a cedar two inches in the same time. 

 But in the memoranda which he kindly furnished there is a 

 difference between the oaks of which he gave me the measure- 

 ments. I do not know what experience the poet Dryden had of 

 trees. He most likely gives us the general opinion of his own day 

 in laying down poetically that an oak's duration is 900 years : 



" Three centuries he grows, and three he stays 

 Supreme in state, and in three more decays." 



* This illustration is said to be as old as the time of Hierocles and first applied 

 to the crow — longava comix. 



t Throughout this paper the term "giith" is taken in the popular sense of 

 circimijKroice. 



