I20 THE DARLEY YEW. 



best when they grew in the place where the seeds, from which 

 they sprang, had been sown. 



The monks of the olden time held the same opinion. In the 

 Chartulary of an Abbey (in Berkshire, I think), I well remember 

 reading an entry, which described the dibbling in of acorns in a 

 wood of the Abbey. 



I have recently heard of an instance where the seeds out of a 

 cone of the Wellingtonia Gigantea were sown, and some of the 

 plants given away, and these grew much less rapidly than the 

 plants that were left to grow where the seeds had been sown. 



A very intelligent gentleman last autumn exhibited at St. 

 Leonard's a piece of the bark of one of those trees. It was 

 twenty inches thick, and solid at the outside, but appeared to be 

 fibrous within. He informed me that the annual rings were about 

 an inch thick, and, if that were so, the diameter of the tree would 

 increase about a foot in six years, which very much invalidates the 

 statements as to the great age of these trees, which have frequently 

 been made. 



