OLD AND REMARKABLE TREES IN BRITAIN. 261 



development, and maintaining a healthy frame, consists in prompt 

 attention to early habits and appearances, and in checking in youth 

 what might prove baneful to the constitution of the plant in later 

 years. This may be called the prospective or active treatment for the 

 maintenance of progressive vigour in trees. The other treatment 

 involves the arrestment of decay or decline in individuals already 

 evincing symptoms more or less defined ; and, while the measures to 

 be adopted are based on the same principles of the growth of vege- 

 table tissues in the tree, they can never be so satisfactory, nor so 

 remedial, as the same steps would be if taken in the case of younger 

 and more vigorous subjects. The method of treatment in regard to 

 such trees may be styled the retrospective or jussive. 



Before, however, proceeding to suggest the various remedies which 

 seem limited to these two classes of old trees, it may, perhaps, be 

 as well that we should cursorily notice the principles of vegetable 

 growth and structure in tree-life, to which reference has been made. 



All organic beings commence their existence at the bottom of 

 the scale, and assuming one type of life after another, finally acquire 

 the parent type or form. The perfect state of one organism is only 

 the embryo form of another — the highest forms being merely the 

 sum or aggregation of all the lower series. Thus the oak tree com- 

 bines within itself all the various divisions and peculiarities of 

 structure upon which the classification of plants is based. Its wood 

 is, as all are well aware, exogenous, i.e., growing from within out- 

 wards ; its bark is endogenous, i.e., growing from without inwards — 

 hence its rugged and serrated appearance of trunk, — and its roots 

 are acrogenous, i.e., growing at their extremities. So it is that the 

 various distinctive characteristics of the vegetable kingdom are 

 embodied in the oak. The cell is the organic atom, the basis of all 

 life. How the cells forming the tissues of the smallest plant, or the 

 wood of the heaviest oak were formed, we cannot comprehend. It 

 is one of the profoundest mysteries of creation. All the innumerable 

 varieties of form, colour, and condition in the vegetable kingdom, 

 arise or result from the conglomeration or combination of cells, and 

 from this source spring the various phenomena of growth in the 

 higher plant life, such as that of trees. In these the cells, as soon 

 as formed, die and give birth to others ; but they do not, as in the 

 case of animal cells, decay and dissolve or change into gases or mine- 

 ral substances, but become enclosed in the tissues of new cells, and 

 are thus preserved from the action of weather and alternations of 

 temperature, the exposure to the influences of either of which would 



