THE LONGEVITY OF TREES. 95 
curious reader to the pages of Evelyn, of Gilpin, and of 
Strutt; to the learned, but over-labored, ‘“ Amecenitates Quer- 
cinee ”’ of the late Professor Burnet, in Burgess’s ‘* Kidoden- 
-dron,” and especially to the more accessible and standard 
Arboretum of Loudon, whose condensed statistical account 
of celebrated British Oaks, occupying thirty closely printed 
pages of that elaborate work, is a monument of diligence, 
and contains a vast amount of interesting information. In- 
deed, Mr. Loudon’s whole account of the Oak is incomparable, 
and should alone suffice to immortalize his name. Among 
the oldest specimens now extant in England are to be enu- 
merated, the ‘ Parliament Oak,” in Clipstone Park, supposed 
to be the oldest park in England, which derives its name 
from a Parliament having been held under it by Edward 
the First, in 1290; the Oak in Yardly Chase, which Cowper 
has immortalized; the “ Winfarthing Oak,” now a bleached 
ruin, which is said to have been called an old oak at the time 
of the Conquest; the Oak in Melbury Park, Dorsetshire, 
which Mitchell calls “as curly, surly, knotty an old monster 
as can be conceived ”; the “ Greendale Oak,” in the Duke of 
Portland’s park at Welbeck, well known from Evelyn’s ac- 
count, and from the series of figures which his editor, Hunter, 
has given of its mutilated trunk, pierced by a lofty arch 
through which carriages have been driven; the ‘“‘ Cowthorpe 
Oak,” in Yorkshire, also figured by Hunter, the trunk of 
which measures seventy-eight feet in circumference near the 
ground, and the age is estimated as nearly coeval with the 
Christian era; and the “Great Oak of Salcey Forest,” in 
Northamptonshire, “a most picturesque sylvan ruin,” which 
is perhaps of equal antiquity. 
We have already mentioned the tree at Bordza, felled some 
thirty years ago, which was proved, by inspection of its annual 
layers, to have been about a thousand years old. Its trunk 
was forty English feet in circumferenee, or twelve and a half 
feet in diameter. This was a goodly tree for an Oak; but it 
shrinks almost to insignificance when compared with one in 
the south of France; an account of which has quite recently 
been published. From a late number of the “ Gardeners’ 
