PLANTED OAK. 803 



should be consolidated about it. When taken up, 

 these were entire and merely wet, while the said 

 heart of oak was completely gone ! 



But that was not the case with oak of former 

 growth : those oak posts and beams, in the 

 earth and out of it, in all sorts of situations with 

 regard to damp, confined air, and all other cir- 

 cumstances which are usually charged as being 

 the causes of rot in the modern oaks. There are 

 old piles drawn out of foundations in the water, 

 where they must have been for upwards of five 

 hundred years; and though the sap-wood of them 

 is in a state of decomposition, and the heart 

 champs when too suddenly exposed to the drought, 

 yet the heart of those, properly treated, is as 

 sound as when it was put down. In the peat- 

 bogs, and other submerged forests, too, there is 

 abundance of oak ; and if care be taken in the 

 drying of it, that oak is as hard and durable, at 

 the same time that it is as black, as ebony. 



But our modern oak will not last as many 

 years, in some instances not as many months, as 

 the old oak lasted centuries. The specimen upon 

 which the above experiment was made, was of 

 chosen oak, picked in the royal forest, and, there- 

 fore, presumable to have been the very best that 

 could be procured, and yet, had it not been pro- 

 tected by the pine beam in which it was cased up, 

 the probability is, that it would not have lasted 

 any longer in its first situation than it did in its 

 last. To build houses of such oak is mockery, to 

 build ships of it is cruel ; for while they have the 

 external appearance of soundness, they may go 

 to pieces with the least strain, and bury all on 

 board in the deep. Only that the fungi are not 



