THE OAK AND CHESTNUT 133 



battle of Worcester; the William Wallace oak at Torwood; Alfred's 

 oak at Oxford; the Charter oak, that bulwark of liberty at Hart- 

 ford, Connecticut, and the Wye oak on the eastern shore of 

 Maryland. 



The oak is especially esteemed by the Anglo-Saxon race not only 

 as the monarch of the forest which turned into ships should forever 

 preserve English liberty, but more particularly as a fit symbol of 

 the sturdy Anglo-Saxon character, that might yield to adversity 

 but which was not to be uprooted or changed by passing storms. 

 A like recognition of the sturdy oak in still earlier days would seem 

 to have been the inspiration for the use of oak leaves as a civic 

 crown by the Romans, who also dedicated the tree to ^Esculapius, 

 probably because of its healthy longevity. 



Not only did maritime folk early come to appreciate oak plank- 

 ing, but the more lowly keepers of the swine Hkewise had their 

 reasons for appreciating the bounty of the oak, in fact the Greek 

 choiros, a pig, is in allusion to oak mast, and acorns were beheved 

 to have been the staple food of humanity in those far distant 

 days before Demeter had introduced grain upon the earth. We 

 find that the British forests are enumerated in the Doomsday Book 

 by the number of hogs they could fatten. Our Latin name for 

 the oak tribe, Quercus, is said to have been derived from the 

 Celtic quer or fine and cuez or tree, so that it will come as something 

 of a shock to learn of the tiny oaks only a few inches high and 

 with spreading underground stems like the Quercus minima of 

 Florida, or to learn of the vast oak forests in Mexico and Central 

 America with their strange undergrowth of small palms, tree 

 ferns and tropical climbers. 



Although the oak may be the monarch of the forest in the tem- 

 perate cKmes of the Northern Hemisphere it is by no means con- 

 fined to those regions but is well represented in most tropical 

 countries except the uplands of Africa and South America where 

 oaks have apparently never reached farther south than the moun- 

 tains of Colombia. There are a number of oaks in the West Indies, 

 and over 300 different kinds are recorded from Central America. 

 Both shores of the Mediterranean as well as the Caribbean have 



