THE LONGEVITY OF TREES. 95 



curious reader to the pages of Evelyn, of Gilpin, and of 

 Strutt ; to the learned, but over-labored, " Amoenitates Quer- 

 cineae '' of the late Professor Burnet, in Burgess's " Eidoden- 

 dron," and especially to the more accessible and standard 

 Arboretum of Loudon, whose condensed statistical account 

 of celebrated British Oaks, occupying thirty closely printed 

 pages of that elaborate work, is a monument of diligence, 

 and contains a vast amount of interesting information. In- 

 deed, Mr. Loudon's whole account of the Oak is incomparable, 

 and should alone suffice to immortalize his name. Among 

 the oldest specimens now extant in England are to be enu- 

 merated, the " Parliament Oak," in Clipstone Park, supposed 

 to be the oldest park in England, which derives its name 

 from a Parliament having been held under it by Edward 

 the First, in 1290 ; the Oak in Yardly Chase, which Cowper 

 has immortalized ; the " Winfarthing Oak," now a bleached 

 ruin, which is said to have been called an old oak at the time 

 of the Conquest; the Oak in Melbury Park, Dorsetshire, 

 which Mitchell calls " as curly, surly, knotty an old monster 

 as can be conceived " ; the " Greendale Oak," in the Duke of 

 Portland's park at Welbeck, well known from Evelyn's ac- 

 count, and from the series of figures which his editor, Hunter, 

 has given of its mutilated trunk, pierced by a lofty arch 

 through which carriages have been driven ; the " Cowthorpe 

 Oak," in Yorkshire, also figured by Hunter, the trunk of 

 which measures seventy-eight feet in circumference near the 

 ground, and the age is estimated as nearly coeval with the 

 Christian era; and the "Great Oak of Salcey Forest," in 

 Northamptonshire, " a most picturesque sylvan ruin," which 

 is perhaps of equal antiquity. 



We hajve already mentioned the tree at Bordza, felled some 

 thirty years ago, which was proved, by inspection of its annual 

 layers, to have been about a thousand years old. Its trunk 

 was forty English feet in circumference, or twelve and a half 

 feet in diameter. This was a goodly tree for an Oak ; but it 

 shrinks almost to insignificance when compared with one in 

 the south of France ; an account of which has quite recently 

 been published. From a late number of the " Gardeners' 



