250 TAXACE 
THE YEW 
(OF THE NATURAL ORDER CONIFER, oF THE 
FAMILY TAXACEZ, oF THE TRIBE TAXINE/, 
OF THE SUB-TRIBE TAXE/) 
Like the black and melancholy Yew Tree, 
Dost think to root thyself in dead men’s graves, 
And yet to prosper ? 
T. WersBstER, The White Devil, A.D. 1612. 
“The Vine loves the hills, the Yew tree the north 
wind and the cold ” (Bacchus amat colles, Aquilonem 
et frigora Taxi), at least that is how Bohn’s Classical 
Library—better known to scholars as the Virgil 
crib—translates it, but AZolus, of wind-bag fame, 
seems to have reckoned Aquilo as one of his parti- 
cularly boisterous products that hailed from the 
west. 
So wrote Virgil 1,945 years ago, at a golden age 
when “song was great,’ and in the close companion- 
ship of the kindred spirits of Horace and Mecenas. 
What sage advice you offered us, illustrious poet, in 
those schoolboy days of our instruction! Had we 
been taught to grasp your meanings, rather than 
stutteringly to attempt a construe of your verses, 
or write out your lines for punishment, what an 
agricultural instruction might we not have imbibed ! 
‘You read us lectures therein ‘on the growing of crops, 
the treatment of soil, the planting and grafting of 
trees, the breeding of animals, and last and least, 
the ways of bees. Had we been allowed to investigate 
the drifts of your reasonings from those forbidden 
translations, to which—in spite of your rules to the 
contrary, learned masters of classical lore—we 
always contrived access, what experiences might we 
not have accumulated in the culture of our lands 
and the feeding of our flocks and herds! 
