MAKCH 67 



conscientious verdict of Dr. Lowe; but botanists 

 and cold men of science cannot but be grateful to 

 him for setting out so clearly the evidence on which 

 it is founded. He starts with an examination of De 

 Candolle's assumption that the age of a yew may be 

 reckoned accurately by counting the concentric rings 

 of growth in the trunk, and shows how fallacious this 

 is, especially in a tree of the peculiar habit of the yew, 

 and so frequently pollarded. He next examines the 

 few historical records from which the exact age of 

 individual trees can be ascertained, and is unable to 

 find one which shows an age greater than two hundred 

 years. This is a sorry surrender of the computation 

 which made out the Fortingall tree, in Perthshire, with 

 its enormous circumference of fifty-four feet, to be from 

 2500 to 2700 years old, or the Clontarf yew to be the 

 one under which Brian Boruibh breathed his last in 

 1014. Tradition is positive that the yews now in 

 Kinglye Bottom, near Chichester, were there when 

 the Norsemen landed in Sussex in the ninth and 

 tenth centuries. 'Had it been said/ observes Dr. 

 Lowe drily, ' that " yews were there," the statement 

 would have been accurate ; but that " the yews," mean- 

 ing those still existing, were then in being is too large 

 a demand on our credulity, as there is no tree at that 

 place which exceeds fifteen feet four inches in girth, or 

 possibly about five hundred years of age.' 



Yews were of national importance when, archers being 

 the most important part of English infantry, it was 

 enacted by a statute of Edward iv. that ' every English- 



