9ff VEGETABLE SUBSTANCES. 



trees of very inferior timber, it equals them both in 

 heifi^ht and diameter. If the symptoms of decay that 

 are apparent in some of those trees, of which the age 

 is known not much to exceed a hundred years, are to 

 be taken as evidence of the sfeneral failure of the 

 tree, and not of its being; in a situation indifferently 

 adapted for it, we should be led to question the s^reat 

 antiquity which has been assigned to some of the 

 chesnut trees in England. The lives of trees must, 

 however, like those of animals, vary with the situa- 

 tions in which they are placed ; and the immense 

 size of the celebrated chesnuts must lead us to assign 

 to them a much longer duration than belongs to some 

 others of the same species. 



Though none of the English chesnuts rival the 

 great one on Mount Etna, yet this country pos- 

 sesses immense trees. That at Hitchin Priory, in 

 Hertfordshire, had, in 1789, a circumference of more 

 than fourteen yards at five feet from the ground, and 

 though the internal part was decayed and hollowed 

 by time, the external part and the leaves were vigo- 

 rous. Grose found one of four chesnuts in the garden 

 at Great Cranford Park, Dorset, thirty^seven feet in 

 circumference ; and though shattered and decayed, it 

 still bore good crops of fniit. In Gloucestershire, there 

 was a chesnut, in the hollow of which was " a pretty 

 wainscoted room, enlightened with windows, and 

 furnished with seats ;" and the great chesnut at Tort- 

 worth, in the same county, had dimensions, and a 

 reputed age, belonging to no other English tree. In 

 the year 1150, it was styled the great old chesnut 

 tree. In 1720, it measured fifty-one fieet at six feet 

 from the ground ; but Lysons, by a later mensura- 

 tion, 1791, made it only forty-five feet three inches. 

 It bore fruit abundantly in 1788; and tradition 

 carries its origin back to the days of the Saxon 

 Egbert. 



