ON THE OLD AVD REMARKABLE YEW TREES IN SCOTLAND. 401 



Tusmore Park, near Bicester in Oxfordshire, and leading from Tus- 

 more Park to Hard wick Cliurch, which is S.E. from the house. It is 

 1296 feet in length, and the trees are planted " square both ways," 

 being 45 feet apart. Two yews from Scottish descent have been 

 planted at a more recent date in the avenue, and are now fully 

 taller than the average of the older trees, and two other old 

 specimens have been blown down, forming gaps in the line of 

 avenue, which have not been tilled up. There are twenty-seven 

 trees on either side, and they girth from 6 to 8 feet on an average 

 at four feet from ground, and vary in height from 40 to 60 feet, 

 Avith a diameter of spread of branches averaging from 40 to 55 feet. 

 Another interesting and quaint relic of yew-tree antiquity is 

 the " Druid's Grove," at Norbury Park, in the Vale of Mickleham, 

 between Box Hill and Denbies, in Surrey, " which forms," says 

 John Stuart MUl, " a piece of natural scenery, unequalled in the 

 world for its combination of beauty and accessibility." The "Druid's 

 Grove " — the remains of an early aboriginal forest of yews — 'hangs 

 pendent-like on the slope of a steep bank, leading past the ruined 

 Chantrey of Chapel Farm, ou the old Pilgrim's Way from the West 

 Country to Canterbury. Although they have no tangible con- 

 nection whatever with the Druids, no doubt fancy and imagination 

 may see in these huge buttresses of antique yew trees, regularly 

 planted circles or places for primitive worship or sacrifice ; and they 

 are worthy of all respect and reverence, for the oldest amongst 

 them cannot have an age of under 2500 years, judging by com- 

 parison with other yew trees of ascertained date elsewhere, and some 

 of which have been referred to in this paper. " They are older far 

 than the Christian religion, twice as old as the English dominion 

 in this island. In some of them, all the original branches are quite 

 dead within, and the bark above lives on in places along the main 

 trunks, supplying sap to new adventitious branchlets, which rise 

 straight into the air, all parallel and perpendicular, like new stems 

 springing from the decay of the old dead ones. This curious last 

 stage of living decrepitude gives a strange weird aspect of witch- 

 like sagacity to some among those hoary giants of antiquity. The 

 tree, indeed, is hardly in any true sense an individual ; it is rather 

 a colony or community, like a spray of coral — the leaves, which are 

 the true living individuals, answering separately to the separate 

 polypes. By the light of such a luminous conception alone — due 

 to the greatest of modern biologists — can we understand aright 

 the long persistence of life in such antique monsters, dead, as it 



