6o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



in the external conditions may have accounted for so slow a rate ; but 

 it would hardly be safe, with such evidence before us, to allow more 

 than three feet a century as the normal growth of a yew, in which case 

 the Fortingal yew in Scotland, fifty-six feet round in 1769, may have 

 lived more than eighteen centuries ; and a longevity in proportion must 

 be accorded to the yews at Fountain's Abbey, or to the Tisbury yew 

 in Dorsetshire, which boasts of thirty-seven feet in circumference. 

 Hence tradition in this case would seem to contain nothing incredible 

 when it asserts that the yews on Kingley Bottom, near Chichester, 

 were on their present site when the sea-kings from the North landed 

 on the coast of Sussex. 



It is, however, but seldom that any real aid can be derived from 

 tradition in estimating the longevity of trees. We have even to be 

 on our guard against it, especially when it associates the general claim 

 to antiquity by a specific name or event. In the classical period the 

 tendency was as strong as it is still ; and we should look to our own 

 legends when tempted to smile at the Delian palm mentioned by Pliny 

 as coeval with Apollo, or at the two oaks at Heraclea as planted by 

 Hercules himself. Pausanias, traveling in Greece in the second century 

 of our era, saw a plane-tree which was said to have been planted by 

 Menelaus when collecting forces for the Trojan war, whence Gilpin 

 gravely inferred that the tree must have been thirteen centuries old 

 when Pausanias saw it. Tacitus calculated that a fig-tree was eight 

 hundred and forty years old because tradition accounted it the tree 

 whereunder the wolf nursed Romulus and Remus. Nor was Pliny's 

 inference more satisfactory, that three hollies still standing in his day 

 on the site of Tibur must have been older than Rome itself, inasmuch 

 as Tibur was older than Rome, and they were the very trees on 

 which Tiburtus, the founder of the former, saw the flight of birds 

 descend which decided him on the site of his city. There is of course 

 no more reason to believe in the reality of Tiburtus than of Francion, 

 the mythical forefather of France, or of Brute the Trojan, the reputed 

 founder of the British Empire. 



These things suffice to justify suspicion of trees associated with par- 

 ticular names, such as Wallace's Oak, or trees claiming to have been 

 planted by St. Dominic or Thomas Aquinas. Our only safe guide is 

 measurement, applied year by year to trees alike of known and of un- 

 known age, of insignificant as of vast dimensions, and recorded in some 

 central annual of botanical information, facilitating the work of com- 

 parison and the arrival at something like trustworthy averages. The 

 experiment, moreover, has not been sufficiently tried whether our old- 

 est trees are capable of an increased rate of growth by the application 

 of fresh earth round their roots, favorable though the case of the Tort- 

 worth chestnut is to the probability of such a result. Until, therefore, 

 such statistics are more numerous than at present, we must be content 

 to rest in the uncertainty with regard to the ages of trees which the 



