250 ENGLISH BOTANY. 
It is thought that the true reading should be “A rown tree witch,” the accepted version 
being a corruption. Bishop Heber mentions in his Journal that in India he found a 
tree very similar in form and shape to the Mountain-ash, regarded with the same super- 
stitious reverence, and used as a preservative against magic. 
The Mountain-ash is the tree for exposed and open situations ; it loves free air 
and plenty of water ; and few trees suffer so much from drought and heat, and but few 
do so well in plantations intended to resist a sharp wind or the sea breeze. 
SPECIES IV—PYRUS DOMESTICA. Sm. 
Prate CCCCLXXXVII. 
Sorbus domestica, Zinn. Sp. Plant. p. 684. 
Leaves pinnate, with 7 to 9 pairs of oblong acutely-serrated 
leaflets, and an odd terminal one, thinly flocculent-felted and grey 
beneath when young, sub-glabrous when old. Flowers in a 
corymbo-paniculate cyme. Calyx-segments applied to the petals 
in flower, inflexed when in fruit. Styles 5, entirely woolly. Fruit 
large, turbinate, dull red, speckled, 5-celled. 
In woods. The only instance of its occurrence in this country 
is that of a single tree in Wire Forest, on the borders of Wor- 
cestershire, no doubt not truly native. It has also been reported 
from Cornwall, but on old and unconfirmed authority. 
[England.] Tree. Early Summer. 
Very like the mountain-ash, but with the young leaves more 
floccose-felted below, the serratures of the leaflets with the outer 
edge straighter, the lateral branches of the inflorescence shorter, so 
that it is rather a panicle than a corymb, the fruit resembling a 
small pear, 1 inch long and always with 5 cells. 
Common NService-tree. 
French, Sorbier Domestique. German, Speierling, Spierapfel. 
The common name of this tree comes, according to Dr. Prior, from the word cerevisia, 
its fruit having in ancient times been used for making a fermented liquor—a kind of 
beer,—and he quotes Virgil as his authority, Evelyn tells us, in his “Sylva,” that 
“ale and beer brewed with these berries, being ripe, is an incomparable drink.” The 
cerevisia of the ancients was made from malt, and took its name, we are told by Isidore of 
Seville, from Ceres, Cereris. It is a tree of very slow growth, and, according to Kroker, 
does not come into bearing before it is sixty years old. The fruit is extremely austere 
when at all unripe, but when mellowed by frost and keeping, it becomes soft, brown, 
and eatable, somewhat like a medlar, though to most people less agreeable. The wood 
is very hard, and was held in.repute for making mathematical rulers and excisemen’s 
gauge-sticks until foreign woods of other kinds superseded it. 
