EPPING FOREST. 33 



dwarfed in height by repeated loppings, and the boughs 

 spring from the hollow gnarled boles of pollard oaks and 

 beeches; the trunks, covered with mosses and whitening 

 canker-stains, or wreathes of ivy, speak of remote antiquity ; 

 but the boughs which their lingering and mutilated life 

 puts forth, are either thin and feeble, with innumerable 

 branchlets, or are centred on some solitary and distorted 

 limb which the woodman's axe has spared. The trees 

 thus assume all manner of crooked, deformed, fantastic 

 shapes all betokening age, and all decay all, despite 

 of the solitude around, proclaiming the waste and ravages 

 of man." 



In Epping Forest there are, it is mentioned in the 

 volume cited, but in another connection, several curious 

 specimens of " inosculated " oaks, exhibiting the singular 

 mode of growth so designated, by which two trees are 

 united together or a branch crossing a trunk becomes 

 united to it a mode of growth, the observation of which, 

 it is supposed by some, to have first suggested the idea of 

 grafting. 



There are here remains from very remote times of wild 

 beasts, which here found their lair. In an article in the City 

 Press it is stated, " The earliest inhabitants of which we find 

 the remains buried around Epping Forest, are a strange 

 and curious assemblage. They are not monsters or abor- 

 tions of Nature, such as the earlier poets and chroniclers 

 loved to describe as haunting the priscan forests of Britain. 

 Their graves in the valleys around their old home have 

 enabled us to repeople the forest scene the glade, the 

 thick brakes, the dense woodland, the open plain, the 

 valley, the river side. And of these sites the glade, the 

 covert, and the open pasture alike seem to have had their 

 appropriate occupants. Elks and stags, elephants and 

 rhinoceroses, bears and bisons, lions and wolves, here found 

 food convenient for them. The mammoth, or northern 

 elephant, and her calf would seem to be the chief figures 

 in the picture, if we may judge from the abundance of 

 their remains. In the midst of an ample vegetation, with 



D 



