THE OAK. 



423 



lings oi ICstreinadiira are princiiially fed upon 

 the acorns of the hallota oak; and to this cause 

 is assigned the great delicacy of their flesh. 



The history of the importance of tlie oak as 

 t imber nearly keeps pace with that of ship-build- 

 ing; and there is little doubt that, from the time 

 of Alfred, Avho first gave England a navy capa- 

 ble of contending with her enemies upon the sea, 

 to that of Nelson (about nine hundred years af- 

 terwards), in whom nautical skill appears to have 

 been raised to the greatest possible height, the 

 oak was the principal and essential material in 

 ship-building. It is more than probable that 

 tlie inferiority of some of our more recently built 

 ships, and the ravages which the dry-rot is mak- 

 ing among them, have arisen from the sxibstitu- 

 tion of foreign oak for that of native growth. A 

 writer in the Quarterly Review has ascribed this 

 evil to the substitution of a foreign species of 

 oak, in our own plantations, instead of continu- 

 ing the true native tree. 



" We may here notice a fact long known to 

 liotanists, but of which our planters and pur- 

 veyors of timber appear to have had no suspi- 

 cion, that there are two distinct species of oak 

 in England,* the qtierctcs robur, and the quercus 

 scssiliflora ; the fonner of which affords a close- 

 grained, firm, solid timber, rarely subject to rot; 

 the other more loose and sappy, very liable to 

 rot, and not half so durable. This difference 

 "as noticed so early as the time of Ray; and 

 Martyn, in his Flora Rastica, and Sir James 

 Smith, in his Flora Britannica, have added their 

 testimonies to the fact. The second species is 

 supposed to have been introduced, some two or 

 tliree ages ago, from the continent, where the 

 oaks are chiefly of this latter species, especially 

 in the German forests, the timber of which is 

 knov^Ti to be very worthless. But what is of 

 more importance to us is, that, de facto, the im- 

 postor abounds, and is propagated vigorously in 

 the New Forest and other parts of Hampshire, 

 in Norfolk, and the northern counties, and about 

 London; and there is but too much reason to be- 

 lieve that the numerous complaints that were 

 lieard about our ships being infested with what 

 was called, improperly enough, dry-rot, were 

 owing to the introduction of this species of oak 

 into the naval dockyards, where, we understand, 

 the distinction was not even suspected. It may 

 thus be discriminated from the true old English 

 oak : the acorn-stalks of the rd)ur are long, and 

 its leaves short; whereas the sessiliflora has the 

 acorn-stalks short, and the leaves lonci ; the 

 acorns of the former grow singly, or seldom two 

 on the same foot-stalk : those of the latter in 

 clusters of two or three, close to the stem of the 

 branch. We believe the Russian ships of the 

 Baltic, that are not of larch or fir, are built of 



* Or ratlier, the scssiliflora may be reckoned a variety. 



tliis species of oak; but if this were not the case, 

 their exposure on the stocks, without cover, to 

 the heat of summer, which, though short, is ex- 

 cessive, and the rifts and chinks, which fill up 

 with ice and snow in the long winter, are enough 

 to destroy the stoutest oak, and quite sufficient 

 to account for their short-lived duration." 



The tnmk of the detached oak acquires by fiir 

 the greater diameter; some of the old hollow 

 trees, most of which are of this description, hav- 

 ing a diameter of as much as sixteen feet in the 

 cavity, and still a shell of timber on the outside, 

 sufficiently vigorous for producing leaves and 

 even acorns. The age to which the oak can con- 

 tinue to vegetate, even after the core has de- 

 cayed, has not been fully ascertained ; but in 

 favouraijle situations it must be very consider- 

 able. In the New Forest, Evelyn counted, in 

 the sections of some trees, three hundred or four 

 hundred concentric rings, or layers, of wood, 

 each of which must have recorded a year's gi'owth. 

 The same celebrated planter mentions oaks in 

 Dennington Park, near Newbury, once the resi- 

 dence of Chaucer, which could not have arrived 

 at the size which they possessed in a less period 

 than about three hundred years ; and though he 

 does not say upon what evidence the opinion is 

 grounded, Gilpin notices, in his Forest Scenery, 

 " a few venerable oaks in the New Forest, that 

 clironicle upon their furrowed trunks ages before 

 the Conquest." 



Some out of the number of ancient oaks that 

 are celebrated, it may not be uninteresting to 

 mention. One of the three in Dennington Park, 

 the King's Oak, was fifty feet high before a 

 bough or even a knot appeared, and the base of 

 it squared five feet entirely solid; the Queen's 

 Oak was straight as a line for forty feet, then di- 

 vided into two immense arms, and the base of it 

 squared to four feet; and Chaucer's oak, said to 

 have been planted by the poet, though inferior 

 to the royal ones, was still a most stately tree. 

 The Framlingham oak (Suffolk), used in the 

 construction of the Royal Sovereign, was four 

 feet nine inches square, and yielded four square 

 beams, each forty-four feet in length. An oak 

 felled at Withy Park (Shropshire), in 1697, was 

 nine feet in diameter without the bark; there 

 were twenty-eight tons of timber in the body 

 alone; and the spread of the top, from bough to 

 bough, was one hundred and forty-four feet. In 

 Holt Forest (Hampshire), there was an oak 

 ■which, at seven feet from the ground, was thirty- 

 four feet in circumference in 1759, and twenty 

 years after, the circumference had not increased 

 half an inch. Dr Plott mentions an oak at Nor- 

 bury which was of the enormous circumference 

 of forty-five feet; and when it was felled, and 

 lying flat upon the ground, two horsemen, one 

 on each side the trank, were concealed from each 

 other. The same author mentions an oak at 



