THE NEW FORESTRY. 5 1 



end than they did at the other. The purchaser had to send 

 his own team to Norfolk to have them removed. That accurate 

 and conscientious observer, Gilbert White, in his " Natural 

 History of Selborne," records similar examples, apparently 

 scarce in his time. " On the Blackmore estate," he writes, 

 " there is a small wood that was lately furnished with a set of 

 oak of a peculiar growth and of great value. They were tall 

 and taper-like firs, but, standing near together, had very 

 small heads, only a little brush without any large limbs. Some 

 trees were wanted that were fifty feet long without bough, 

 and would measure twelve inches diameter at the little end. 

 Twenty such trees did a purveyor find in this little wood, 

 with this advantage, that many of them answered the des- 

 cription at sixty feet These trees were sold for £20 a piece." 

 The remains of .many old woods in Yorkshire, and records 

 connected with them, seem to show that that county must 

 have been famous for its oak in times past. We have never 

 seen the Yorkshire oak surpassed for size and quality, and it 

 has struck us several times that the oak trees of Hampshire, 

 Surrey, and other parts south of London, were short and 

 inferior to those produced in Yorkshire of the same age, par- 

 ticularly the plantation oak in the New Forest and 

 neighbourhood. In " Hunter's Hallamshire " (Yorkshire) it 

 is stated that a Mr. John Harrison made a " minute survey," 

 in 1637, of the Manor of Sheffield, for the Earl of Arundel, 

 in which he thus describes the " stately timber " growing in 

 Sheffield Park and Rivelin Chase: — "The Haugh Park is 

 full of excellent timber of very great length and very straight, 

 and many of them of great bigness, being about sixty feet in 

 length before you came to a knott, insomuch that it hath been 

 said by travellers that they have not seen such timber in 

 Christendom." Evelyn, we also learn from the same source, 

 " accounts for the noble timber with which the hills , about 

 Sheffield were once graced." Mr. John Halton, the Duke of 

 Norfolk's auditor, told Evelyn that " in the Park alone there 

 were not fewer than a thousand trees worth at least six thou- 

 sand pounds, another thousand worth four thousand pounds 

 and so on in proportion." We are acquainted with the extent 

 of the locality here mentioned, and judging from that, and 

 the number of trees given, they must have grown up in dense 

 masses, as their shape and length seem to testify. Not very 

 far from Sheffield we once valued, and saw sold by auction, 

 a number of lots of old and sound oak equal to those described 

 by Evelyn, the remains of an old and dense wood. The sale 



