The Beeches 



woods. Its rind is smooth, close knit and of soft Quaker grey, 

 sometimes mottled and in varying shades, and decorated with 

 delicate lichens. The limbs are darker in colour, and the brown 

 twigs, down to their bird's-claw buds, shine as if polished. Through 

 the long summer the beech is beautifully clad; its leaves are thin 

 and soft as silk. Few insects injure them, and they resist tearing 

 by the wind. In the autumn the first touch of frost turns their 

 green to gold, and they cling to the twigs until late in winter. 

 Young trees in sheltered places hold their leaves longest. 



The European Beech {F. sylvatica, Linn.) is one of the 

 most important timber trees of Europe, and the parent of the 

 purple and weeping beeches and other ornamental horticultural 

 forms in cultivation in European and American parks and private 

 grounds. It grows to noble size and form in America, distin- 

 guished chiefly by the darker colour of its bark from the native 

 species. At home from middle Europe south and east to the 

 Caucasus, the beech is much used as a dooryard tree; it grows 

 famously in England, their beeches being the pride of many 

 English estates. 



Pure forests of beech are often seen in Germany and Den- 

 mark. The lumber is hard and heavy, one of the most important 

 hard woods of the Continent, The multitude of its uses prevents 

 a complete list. Beech bark with hieroglyphics cut in it bore 

 messages between tribes, friendly and belligerent, in the earliest 

 times. Beechen boards preserved the first records. These were 

 the primitive hooks of northern Europe. From heech to huch is not 

 a long etymological step in the Teutonic languages. Book is a 

 lineal descendant of the Anglo-Saxon word hece, the name of this 

 tree. There are those who derive the words beaker through 

 Becher, a drinking cup, from the same old tree root. Justification 

 is found in the fact that bowls and other household utensils were 

 made of beech wood because they could be depended upon not 

 to leak. 



Beech nuts furnished, in ancient times, a nutritious article 

 of human food, and an oil used for lamps, quite as sweet and good 

 for cooking and table use as olive oil. Fagus (Gr. phagein, to eat) 

 means "good to eat." Beech leaves furnished forage for cattle, 

 and were dried and used to fill mattresses. Evelyn vows he never 

 slept so sweetly as on a bed of beech leaves. The idea is certainly 

 an attractive one, and worth carrying out. 



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