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Mr. Bentham being called upon by the Chairman to addi-ess the 

 meeting, said that he had listened to the paper of Mr. ■Woodhouse with 

 much pleasure. He, however, conld not subscribe to the proposition that 

 the Yew is indigenous. The seeds of that as well as of many other trees were 

 easily transported by the wind or by birds, and were thus plentifully sown ; 

 and when the seeds found suitable conditions of soil and moisture, as in Here- 

 fordshire, they germinated freely. Then, too, it must be remembered that 

 in early times the wood of the Yew was found to be useful for bows as well aa 

 for various domestic purposes, so that it became profitable to plant and 

 cultivate it. Upon full considerations of the evidence that had been brought 

 forward on both sides, he had been induced to come to a conclusion different 

 from that which Mr. Woodhouse had arrived, viz., that upon the whole the 

 probabilities were against the Yew being indigenous. If, indeed, there -were 

 any proof that the Yew was in the country during the Roman occupation, that 

 ■would have been, as stated by Mr. Woodhouse, a strong argument in favour 

 of his position ; but he (Mr Bentham) was not aware that there were any 

 facts, historical or other, warranting that supposition. We have no doubt 

 yew-trees which, from their appearance, date probably from Saxon times, but 

 there are no means of ascertaining the real age of our oldest trees. Even if 

 they were cut down, as the interior has generally been long since destroyed by 

 decay, the number of annual rings, the only unerring test of the age of trees, 

 cannot now be counted. Nothing is more fallacious than judging of the age of 

 trees by the diameter of their trunk, as is shown, for instance, by the error 

 into which even De CandoUe has fallen in the immense age which he had 

 ascribed to the Baobabs of tropical Africa, or by the mistakes of modem 

 lecturers on the gigantic Wellingtonia, to which an age of three to four 

 thousand years had been ascribed, whereas one of the largest, when cat down, 

 showed only 1,400 years in the whole, and showed also that the increase in 

 diameter had been very irregular — rapid in the first three or four centuries, 

 then much slower for three or four centuries more, then increasing again for 

 three or four centuries before it dwindled down to the slow growth of age 

 (applause), 



Mr. E. Lees said that there was one remarkable point in the physiology 

 of the Yew which the writer of the paper they had just heard had not 

 attended to, though it was a most important circumstance to illustrate, and 

 that was its imperishability. By the laws of vegetable life as exemplified in 

 the yew-tree, there was no limit to its duration, and trees might be now in 

 existence so old as to be beyond histoiical data. He had before said, and he 

 still affirmed, that though the Yew had been brought into connection with the 

 rites of the Church as the emblem of immortality in the west, as the cypress 

 was in the east, yet in numerous places the Church had been brought to the 

 Yew, and not the Yew to the Church, The' circumstance of yews being already 

 growing on a convenient and perhaps previously venerated spot had induced 

 the erection of a church by the first Christians. He could adduce numerous 



