30 



THE CHESTNUT. 



the glory of the forest and visited from all quar- 

 ters ; that for many years past it had been re- 

 duced to the venerable ruin we beheld. We be- 

 gan to examine it with more attention, and found 

 that there is an appearance that these five trees 

 were really once united in one. The opening 

 in the middle is at present prodigious ; and it 

 does indeed require faith to believe that so vast 

 a space was once occupied by solid timber. But 

 there is no appearance of bark on the inside of 

 any of the stumps, nor on the sides that are oppo- 

 site to one another. Mr. Glover and I measured 

 it separately, and brought it exactly to the same 

 size, viz., two hundred and four feet round. If 

 this was once united in one solid stem, it must 

 with justice indeed have been looked upon as a 

 very wonderful phenomenon in the vegetable 

 world, and deservedly styled the glory of the 

 forest. 



" I have since been told by an ingenious eccle- 

 siastic of this place that he was at the expense of 

 carrying up peasants with tools to dig round the 

 Castagno de Cento Cavalli, and he assures me, 

 upon his honour, that he found all these stems 

 united below-ground in one root. I alleged that 

 so extraordinary an object must have been cele- 

 brated by many of their writers. He told me 

 that it had, and produced several examples, Phi- 

 loteo, Carrera, and some others. Carrera begs to 

 be excused from telling its dimensions, but he 

 says, he is sure there is wood enough in that one tree 

 to build a large palace ; and Massa, one of their 

 most esteemed authors, says he has seen solid 

 Oaks upwards of forty feet round ; but adds, that 

 the size of the Chestnut-trees was beyond belief, 



