SESSILE-FRUITED OAK. 251 



owing to their age, the largest of them not being more 

 than six or seven years old. 



We now proceed to such observations as apply to both 

 the British Oaks, for as we have already observed, their 

 statistics are too closely interwoven to allow of being 

 separately treated, and what we have to say in regard 

 to the culture, management, and properties of the one 

 is equally applicable to the other. 



The Oak is indigenous throughout Britain, and in former 

 ages, before the clearing away of the forests had com- 

 menced, appears to have covered a very large portion of its 

 surface, for even in districts where the natural or self-sown 

 Oak is now rarely seen, the remains of noble and gigantic 

 trees are frequently met with, sometimes in the alluvial 

 deposits on the margins of our rivers, or in boggy places, 

 covered with a layer of peat moss, which has been gener- 

 ated around them by the stagnation of the water caused 

 by their fall. Examples of this kind are frequent in our 

 own county (Northumberland), and we know of several 

 trees of large dimensions that have been exhumed in tracts 

 where, at the present day, scarcely an Oak of any great 

 age, or that has attained one-fourth the size of those 

 former denizens of the forest, is now to be met with. At 

 Linden, the seat of Charles W. Bigge Esq., the trunk of 

 a magnificent Oak was extracted from a peat moss, that 

 fills a small basin or hollow, evidently produced by the 

 stagnation of a stream which now passes through it, and 

 which at some distant period had been dammed back 

 by the fall of the trees upon its margins. This Oak was 

 covered by a layer of the peat to the depth of about three 

 feet, and was discovered by probing the moss. The trunk, 

 with a small portion of one of the larger limbs, was with 

 great labour and difficulty dragged from its miry bed. The 



