SWEET, OR SPANISH CHESNUT. 325 



rally prevailed, and, indeed, we may add still partially exists, 

 that the roofing and main beams of many of our ancient 

 buildings and houses were framed of the Chesnut, naturally 

 gave rise to the idea that a tree so abundant and generally 

 distributed as it must have been in former ages, must also 

 have been of indigenous growth ; for this supposed Chesnut 

 timber, we may remark, is not confined to buildings in the 

 southern and midland districts of the kingdom, but is also 

 found in the northern counties, and even in Scotland, for 

 Sir T. Dick Lauder, apparently not aware of the dis- 

 coveries of Daubenton and others, instances the roof of 

 the parliament house in Edinburgh, as constructed of 

 Chesnut.* 



The examination, however, and the repeated experi- 

 ments that of late years have been made upon this wood, 

 have satisfactorily proved that, in all such instances, the 

 timber of the oak, and chiefly of the sessile-fruited kind, 

 have been mistaken for Chesnut ; and this fact, in a great 

 measure, does away with any argument that might other- 

 wise have been adduced in favour of the Chesnut's indi- 

 genous origin, had the application of its timber in reality 

 been as extensive as these ancient buildings seemed to 

 indicate. It is also more in accordance with what we 

 collect from the earliest of our arboricultural writers, viz., 

 that the Chesnut in their time was by no means of common 

 occurrence or widely distributed ; for Tusser, in 1512, 

 enumerates Chesnuts in his list of fruit trees to be planted 

 at a particular period of the year, and the author of an 

 "Old Thrift Newly Revived" recommends planting the 

 Chesnut as " a kind of timber tree of which few grow in 



* It is remarkable that the same belief of the use of Chesnut wood in ancient 

 buildings also prevailed in France. Buffon, however, and afterwards Daubenton, 

 showed that the timber taken for that of the Chesnut, was, in fact, that of Quer. 

 scsdliflora. 



