90 ESS A YS. 



" Where Burgundy bequeathed his tombless host, 

 A bony heap, through ages to remain 

 Themselves their monument ; " — 



and may even outlast the obelisk recently erected upon its 

 site. The age of this tree and the girth of its trunk being 

 well known, — having attained the circumference of fourteen 

 English feet in 364 years, — it has been employed as a stand- 

 ard of comparison, in computing the age of larger and more 

 venerable trunks of the same species. 



Such a tree is still standing at the village of Villars-en- 

 Moing, near the town of Morat, in full health and vigor, 

 although portions of the bark are known to have been stripped 

 off about the time of the battle in 1476, when it was already 

 a noted tree. At four feet above the ground, the trunk has 

 a circumference of thirty-eight English feet, and consequently 

 a diameter of about twelve feet. Supposing it to have grown, 

 on the whole, even a little more rapidly than the Freiburg 

 Linden, which may be deemed a safe estimate, when we 

 recollect that old trees grow much more slowly than younger 

 ones, — supposing it to have increased in diameter at the aver- 

 age rate of one sixth of an inch in a year, it must have been 

 864 years old at the time the measurement was made, in the 

 year 1831. It is not probable that this estimate materially 

 exaggerates the age of the tree, even supposing the Linden at 

 Freiburg to have grown at less than the average rate for the 

 species. It is nearly corroborated, indeed, by the more cele- 

 brated Linden of Neustadt on the Kocher, in Wurtemberg, 

 whose age rests wholly upon historic evidence. The readers 

 of Evelyn will surely remember his interesting account of this 

 tree ; and in recent times, some further particulars in its his- 

 tory have been rescued from oblivion by M. Jules Trembley, 

 who visited it in 1831, at the instance of the illustrious De 

 Candolle. It must have been already remarkable early in the 

 thirteenth century ; for, as is proved by documents still extant 

 in the registers of the town, the village of Helmbundt, having 

 been destroyed in the year 1226, was rebuilt three years after- 

 wards, at some distance from its former site, in the vicinity 

 of this tree, and took the name of " Neustadt an der grossen 



