106 ESSAYS. 
“Darley Yew” in Derbyshire, having a mean diameter of 
nine feet five inches, would, by this rule, be 1356 years old. 
The Yew in Tisbury churchyard, Dorsetshire, the trunk of 
which measures thirty-seven feet in circumference, would now 
be almost 1600 years old. The same computation, applied 
to the ‘“superannuated Yew-tree of Braburne churchyard, 
Kent,” which, by the measurements of Evelyn himself and 
of Sir George Carteret, was fifty-eight feet eleven inches in 
circumference in the year 1660, would give it the respectable 
age of 2540 years at that time! This tree has long ago dis- 
appeared. But it did not greatly exceed in size the Yew 
still extant in Fortingal churchyard, in Perthshire, Scotland, 
situated in a wild district among the Grampian Mountains, 
which forms a good collateral witness to the credibility of 
Evelyn’s account. The trunk of the “ Fortingal Yew” was 
fifty-two feet in circumference, when measured by the Hon. 
Daines Barrington in 1769 ;1 or fifty-six feet six inches, ac- 
cording to Pennant’s somewhat later measurement ;* the dis- 
crepancy being, no doubt, attributed to the fact that the two 
measurements were taken at different heights. In Barring- 
ton’s time, the surface was nearly entire at the base, although 
upon one side all the interior had decayed. Afterwards, the 
cavity reached the opposite surface ; and the trunk at length 
separated into two distinct semicircular portions, dead and 
decaying within, but alive and growing at the circumference, 
between which the rustic funeral processions were long accus- 
tomed to pass on their way to the grave. In this condition 
it is figured by Strutt, as the first illustration of his “ Sylva 
Scotica ” ; but he has omitted to inform us when the sketch 
was taken. We suspect that it represents the tree as it ap- 
peared more than fifty years ago; for, if we rightly appre- 
hend the account given by the excellent Dr. Neill of Edin- 
burgh, who visited the place in the summer of 1833, one of 
these half-trunks has now disappeared, with the exception of 
some decayed portions that scarcely rise above the soil; but 
the other, which still shoots forth branches from the summit, 
1 «Phil. Trans.,” lix. p. 37. 
2 « Tours in Scotland,” in Pinkerton’s Gen. Coll., vol. iii. 
