PKEHISTOKIC FLORA. 325 



c Britannia/ p. 476, cit. Professor Pearson, I.e.). As there is however 

 no question that the beech fails to form any very large proportion of our 

 South Britain peat-mosses, it may be suggested that this transference to 

 the beech by the Welsh of a name which originally belonged to the oak 

 (see Max Miiller, ■ Science of Language/ ser. ii. p. 236) must have taken 

 place in a country where a preponderance had been gained by the former 

 over the latter tree. If therefore Denmark was the country, see supra, 

 p. 631, whence the bronze-importing invaders of this island came, the 

 beech must have been a prominent tree there at an earlier period than is 

 usually supposed \ Or it may have abounded here at that time and yet 

 left, as in Denmark, no remains in the uncongenial peat. 



By the word ' abietem/ Julius meant probably the Abies 2>ectinata, s. 

 Pinus picea L., our ' silver fir/ a tree with which, as being a Swiss, a 

 French, and a Pyrenean pine, and climbing those heights in company 

 with the beech, his campaigns in Western Europe had sufficiently 

 familiarised him. The Scotch fir, Pinus sylvestris, was for many cen- 

 turies later the only representative in these islands of the Abietineae, and 



1 As against the prominence, though not against the existence, of the beech in our 

 own country at a much later period might be urged the fact that it is not mentioned 

 by Chaucer in three places, 'The Assembly of Foules ' (ed. Bell, 1855, vol. iv. p. 195), 

 • The Romaunt of the Rose ' (vol. vii. p. 59), and ' The Complaint of a Lover's Life ' 

 (vol. viii. p. 8), where he does mention nearly all the other trees which in the 

 fourteenth century entered largely into the composition of the English landscape ; 

 to wit, the ' oke,' the ' asshe/ the ' elme,' the 'boxe,' the ' firre/ the ' ewe,' the ' aspe,' 

 'notes/ s. ' philbert ' (hazel), the 'bolas/the ' pyn/ the 'maples,' the 'popler,' the 

 'lyndes,' the 'hauthorne.' And it might be said that in a Welsh poem ascribed to 

 Taliessin, but referred by Professor Pearson (1. c. p. 48) to the fourteenth century, 

 the beech and lime are both left unmentioned in describing a battle of the trees ; 

 and that the beech is omitted from a much earlier Welsh poem ascribed to Llywarch 

 Hen in the sixth century. See Skene, ' Four Ancient Books of Wales,' i. pp. 279 and 

 576, cit. Pearson, 1. c. As against the evidence furnished by a fourth passage from 

 Chaucer, 'The Knightes Tale/ vol. i. ed. cit. p. 182, in which, as in Spenser's ' Faery 

 Queen,' i. 7, 8, 9, the beech and also the birch and willow are added to the trees 

 above enumerated, it might be objected that ' the whole description of the funeral 

 and games is taken from the sixth book of the Thebais ; ' and as a matter of fact we 

 have the words 'gli alti faggi ' standing in the parallel passage, ' Teseide, ' xi. 22, 

 col. 237, ed. Ven. 1838. But Professor Earle writes to me upon this matter to the fol- 

 lowing effect : ' In the Knightes Tale, the marshalling of the trees in a catalogue is in 

 manner Chaucer's own; and the majority of the trees, also, are his, and not Boccaccio's. 

 . . . But as far as philological and literary evidence goes, it is all in favour of the trees 

 being at Chaucer's time familiarly English. The word beech was ready to hand, and 

 in its final form which has not since been modified. Yet that word was a considerable 

 remove from the Anglo-Saxon b6c, and such modification postulates warm and con- 

 stant usage. The word is ancestral, older, I mean, than our distinct national 

 existence; it is so like in Anglo-Saxon to what it is in Icelandic and in German 

 as to prove that there was no breach of continuity in its use from the earliest time.' 



