20 The Qiicrcus and Fagus of the Ancients. 



dus, has approached nearer the meaning of Virgil. " Grimoaldus thinks that 

 the poet means a wild sort of chestnut, which might be used as a stock upon 

 which to graft the beech." {Arboretum, 1956.) 



I submit, with much confidence, that the true explanation of this very difficult 

 passage in Virgil is to be discovered in a practice then, and still later (in the 

 time of Pliny), extremely rare, and considered extremely curious, but now so 

 common that it pervades the whole of Europe wherein the chestnut is grown ; 

 I allude to the practice of grafting the chestnut upon itself, that is, the improved 

 sort, the Fagus, which the Romans derived from the Greeks, and the Greeks 

 from the Asiatics, upon the wilder stock, the Castanea, which flourished in its 

 native mountains, from the Pyrenees to the Euxine, The difference between 

 the chdtaignes and the marrons is strongly marked in France ; " the former 

 being to the latter what the crab is to the apple." " In many countries 

 where the chestnut trees are cultivated, the people graft the largest and the 

 fairest fruit upon stocks raised from the nut: all these grafted trees are by the 

 French called marronniers, but they are unfit for timber." (Hunter's note to 

 Evelyn, i. 154.) However common it may be now, it was certainly looked 

 upon by Pliny as a most extraordinary performance, and worthy of especial 

 notice : " Non est omittenda raritas unius exempli. Corellius, eques Rom., 

 Ateste genitus, insevit Castancam sitometipso surculo in Neapolitano agro, sic 

 facta est Castanea quas ab eo nomen accepit, inter laudatas. Postea Etereius, 

 libertus, Corellianam iterum insevit. Haec est inter eas differentia, ilia copio- 

 sior, haec Etereiana melior." (V. A., xvii. 17.) Palladius also (xii. 7.) men- 

 tions the same fact : " Castanea inseritur, sicut probavi ipse, inseritur in se." 

 This confidence in the interpretation of Virgil's Fagus here put forth is 

 not shaken by the circumstance, however unaccountable, of the word 

 having changed its signification between the days of the poet and those 

 of Pliny. Symmachus (Macrob. Saturnal., iv. 14.) demands: " Vellem ex 

 te audire, Servi, tanta nucibus* nomina, quae causa vel origo variaverit ? " 

 This question may not, in the case of the Fagus, admit of a satisfactory answer; 

 but we may gather from it that changes had occurred, as they are at present 

 of every-day occurrence. At all events, we may be permitted to presume 

 that the mystery of grafting the chestnut upon the chestnut, the Fagus upon 

 the Castanea, as mentioned by Pliny and Palladius, was not unknown to 

 Virgil, although it might have been confined to the gardens of Greece alone. 

 Under this conviction, the perplexity of the passage is entirely removed ; no 

 grammatical figure need be called upon for its assistance ; the text may stand 

 unmolested and unsuspected ; and Virgil appears intelligibly in his natural 

 character of poet, rural economist, and philosopher. 



Hamp>ton Lodge, October, 1838. 



* The chestnut was accounted a nut by the ancients, and classed by Pliny 

 among the frugiferous trees ; whereas the beech ranks with him as the best of 

 the glandiferous tribe. " Nuces vocamus et castaneas, quanquam accommoda- 

 tiores glandium generi ; " an arrangement which (without any view apparently 

 of following Pliny, but led by the same principles) has been adopted by the 

 author of the Encyclopcedia of Gardening, p. 1142.: "The Spanish chestnut 

 has been already described as a fruit tree." The Greeks also reckoned the 

 improved chestnut as a nut ; Nicander, for instance, where he gives the origin 

 of its name : " AvaXeweog icapvoio, rjv ILaaravig irpatyiv cda." Theophrastus, by 

 his icapva, or 'HpaicXtojTiicii icapva, probably means the Asiatic chestnut ; for his 

 Aibg [SaXavoQ is far more likely to have been the Jovis glans, or walnut. This 

 would appear from the words of Opilius (Macrob. Saturnal., ii. 14.) : " Hera- 

 cleotica haec nux, quam quidam castaneam vocant." In Virgil's lines (Georg., 

 i. 187.),— 



" Contemplator item, ubi nux se plurima sylvis 

 Induet in florem, et ramos curvabit olentes," 



the nux is said, usually, to mean " the almond." Professor Martyn is stre- 

 nuous for its being the walnut ; but the expressions of " abundant in the 



