AMONG THE OAKS 119 
oak, while on drier land, particularly when of 
a limy nature, the beech is its most useful 
associate. 
Accurate data as to the rate of growth of 
oak in British woods are not yet available on a 
sufficiently large scale to enable tables of average 
height, girth, and cubic contents to be framed 
for any or each class of soil. About sixty years 
ago the estimate was that an oak growing on 
a good soil and in a favourable situation should 
contain about a ton of timber at seventy-five 
years of age. In the oak woods of Hanover 
the average yield on the better classes of soil 
varies from about fifty to seventy-five cubic feet 
per acre per annum for mature crops of pure 
oak harvested at 160 years of age; but this 
is of actual solid cubic contents, which must be 
reduced by more than one-fifth before it can 
be brought to the level of the ‘square of the 
quarter-girth’ method employed in estimating 
the cubic contents of standing trees or timber 
in the log in Britain. How careful one must 
be, however, in accepting statistics of this sort 
is shown by the fact that the total contents 
above the soil of highwoods of pure oak can 
