In Latin, Taxus ; in French, If. 



• 593. The botanical characters are :— The male flowers are produced on 

 separate trees from the fruit for the most part ; they have neither empale- 

 ment nor petals ; but the gem is like a four-leaved cover ; they have a great 

 number of stamina which are joined at the bottom in a column longer than 

 the gem, terminated by depressed summits, having obtuse borders and eight 

 points, opening on each side of their base, casting their farina. The female 

 flowers are like the male ; having no impalements or petals, but having an 

 oval acute-pointed germen, but no style, crowned by an obtuse stigma. 

 The germen afterwards becomes a berry lengthened from the receptacle, 

 globular at the top, and covered by a proper coat at bottom, open at the top, 

 full of juice, and of a red colour ; but as it dries, wastes away, including 

 one oblong oval seed, the top of which, without the belly, is prominent. 



594. " Though last not least", to use a saying that has 

 been more than worn out for these last five hundred years. 

 This is our native English Cedar. Its outward appear- 

 ances are well known to us all ; for, first or last, the most of 

 us have seen a church-yard, however few, comparatively, 

 may have been within the church, and there is scarcely a 

 church-yard in England that does not present a Yew tree 

 to the eyes of the beholder. The Yew tree sometimes 

 rises to the height of forty or fifty feet, and would go a 

 great deal higher if attention were paid in the pruning the 

 side-shoots as the tree increases in height. It is frequently 

 a very large tree. I have seen several, each of which has 

 been more than fifteen feet round the trunk ; and as I men- 

 tioned in a Rural Ride performed in the month of August, 

 1823, I measured the Yew Tree in the church-yard of the 

 village of Selborne, in Hampshire, which was, at some 

 distance from the ground, twenty-three feet and eight inches 



