464 pfaat "bore, Iscge'f^/, anel Isijric/, 



A harden 'd Oak ; his shoulders are the same, 



And Oak his high exahed head became. 



His hundred arms, which lately through the air 



Were spread, now to as many boughs repair. 



A sevenfold bark his now stiff trunk does bind ; 



And where the giant stood a tree we find. 



The earth to Jove straight consecrates this tree, 



Appeasing so his injured deity. 



Thus Oaks grew sacred, in whose shelter plac'd, 



The first good men enjoy 'd their Acorn feast." 



To do full justice to the legendary lore connected with the 

 Oak, it would be necessary to devote a volume to the subject : 

 the largest, strongest, and as some say, the most useful of the trees 

 of Europe, it has been generally recognised as the king of the 

 forest, 



" Lord of the woods, the long-surviving Oak." 



An emblem of majesty and strength, the Oak has been revered 

 as a symbol of God by almost all the nations of heathendom, and 

 by the Jewish patriarchs. It was underneath the Oaks of Mamre 

 that Abraham dwelt a long time, and there he erected an altar 

 to the Lord, and there he received the three angels. It was 

 underneath an Oak that Jacob hid the idols of his children, for this 

 tree was held sacred and inviolable (Gen. xxxv., 2 — 4). Under the 

 "Oak of weeping," the venerable Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, was 

 interred. The messenger of the Lord that appeared to Gideon 

 sat beneath an Oak ; and it was a branch of one of these trees that 

 caught the flowing hair of Absalom, and so caused the death of 

 King David's beloved son. The Oaks of Bashan are several times 

 mentioned in the Bible, and in the sacred volume we are informed 

 that the Israelites worshipped and offered sacrifices beneath the 

 shadow of Oaks which they considered as sacred (Hosea iv., 13 ; 

 Ezekiel vi., 13 ; Isaiah i., 29). 



The ancient Greeks attributed the deluge of Boeotia to the 

 quarrels between Jupiter and Juno. After the rain had ceased and 

 the water subsided, an oaken statue became visible, erecfled, it is 

 supposed, as a symbol of the peace concluded between the king of 

 the gods and his consort. The Oak was thought by the Greeks to 

 have been the first tree that grew on the earth, and to have 

 yielded for man Acorns and honey, to ensure nourishment and 

 fecundity. They called it, indeed, the mother-tree, and they 

 regarded it as a tree from which the human race had originally 

 sprung — a belief shared by the Romans, for we find Virgil speaking 



" Of nymphs and fauns, and savage men, who took 

 Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn Oak." 



Acorns were the first food of man, and there is an old Greek 

 proverb in which a man's age and experience are expressed by 

 saying that he had eaten of Jove's Acorns. Some of the classic 

 authors speak of the fatness of the earliest inhabitants of Greece 

 and Southern Europe, who, living in the primeval forests, were 



