AGE OF TREES. 51 



nerally speaking, neither oral tradition, nor written 

 testimony, remains to indicate the period when a 

 tree sprang up. This oak, however, from all the 

 signs of age that it retains, must have existed as a 

 sapling at some very distant day, and is the most 

 undoubted relic of antiquity in the vegetable world 

 that we possess. 



The elm and the beech, in age, frequently pre- 

 sent very decided vestiges of a former day ; but 

 the oak of centuries has impressed upon it indelible 

 characters of antiquity, and is a visible vetustum 

 monumentum. The wreathings and contortions of 

 its bark, even its once vigorous^ but now sapless 

 limbs, with their bare and bleached summits, stag- 

 headed and erect, maintain a regality of character 

 which perfectly indicates the monarch of the forest, 

 and which no other tree assumes. We have many 

 accounts in different authors of the prodigious size 

 which the oak has attained in England ; but most 

 of the trees that have arrived at any vast circum- 

 ference, seem, like this our village oak, to have lost 

 their leaders when young, and hence are short in 

 the butt : yet we have records of aspiring timber 

 trees of this species, of astonishing magnitude, 

 though perhaps none of them exceed those men- 

 tioned by Evelyn, cut down near Newberry, in 

 Berkshire, one of which ran fifty feet clear without 

 a knot, and cut clean timber five feet square at the 

 base ; its consort gave forty feet of clear, straight 

 timber, squaring four feet at its base, and nearly a 

 yard at the top, The " lady oak/' mentioned by Sir 



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