CHAP, in S Y L V A 25 



either improve or decay, (the end of one being still 

 the beginning of the other) but farther than which 

 their natures do not extend ; but immediately (though 

 to our senses imperceptibly) through some infirmity 

 (to which all things sublunary be obnoxious) dwindle 

 and impair, either through age, defect of nourishment, 

 by sickness and decay of principal parts ; but especi- 

 ally and more inevitably, when violently invaded by 

 mortal and incurable infirmities, or by what other 

 extinction of their vegetative heat, substraction, or 

 obstruction of air and moisture ; which making all 

 motions whatsoever to cease and determine, is the 

 cause of their final destruction. 



2. Our honest countreyman, to whose experience 

 we have been obliged for something I have lately 

 animadverted concerning the pruning of trees, does 

 in another chapter of the same treatise, speak of the 

 age of trees. The discourse is both learned, rational, 

 and full of encouragement : For he does not scruple 

 to affirm, that even some fruit-trees may possibly 

 arrive to a thousand years of age ; and if so fruit- 

 trees, whose continual bearing does so much impair 

 and shorten their lives, as we see it does their form 

 and beauty ; how much longer might we reasonably 

 imagine some hardy and slow-growing forest-trees 

 may probably last ? I remember Pliny tells us of 

 some oaks growing in his time in the l Hercynian 

 forest, which were thought co-evous with the world 

 it self; their roots had even raised mountains, and 

 where they encounter'd swell'd into goodly arches, 

 like the gates of a city : But our more modern 

 author's calculation for fruit-trees (I suppose he means 



1 Hercyniae silvae roborum vastitas intacta aevis, & congenita mundo, prope 

 immortali sorte miracula excedit. Plin. 1. 16. c. 2. 



DD 



