15 
that he had thought that no good museum would he without it. 
My hearers will remark that the old tree has been well girded with 
iron, and shored up by wooden props ; the latter, however, are so 
densely overgrown with ivy, that they greatly obscure the outline 
of the tree, and a freo clearance of undergrowth from its vicinity 
is greatly to bo desired, as it is now impossible, from any one 
position, to get even a fair idea of the extent and magnificence of 
the ruin ; and to obtain a satisfactory sketch of it is, of course, 
equally out of the question. 
In younger and sounder trees an approximative guess as to age 
may be made from their diameter ; or, when felled, from the num- 
ber and width of their concentric annual wood layers, but a hollow 
tree appears, after a certain age, (like many people of a certain age,) 
to bo somowhat backward in registering its birthdays, or, in other 
words, in adding to its external circumference by the addition of 
its annual ring. The explanation of this would seem to be, that 
the new deposit of wood has freedom to extend itself inwardly 
towards the rotting contre, and finds loss resistance in that direc- 
tion than outwardly towards the cortex. But, at any rate, one 
fact of interest may be gathered from the measurement of this old 
trunk. In 1820, as appears on the brass plate, its circumference 
was 40 feet near the middle, and 70 feet at its roots, and when I 
last measured it in July, 1873, it was exactly the same. Thus, in 
53 years, it has added nothing to its circumference, (owing pro- 
bably to the cause I have just alluded to,) and it seems to me very 
probable, that for many a fifty-three years it may have been sta- 
tionary, or nearly stationary, its new wood rather tending to 
decrease its inside area than to enlarge it externally. It appears 
then, to be impossible to estimate the age of such trees as this by 
their measurements, and as the matter stands, we must be content 
with Mr. Loudon’s estimate, which gives it the age of about 1500 
years. May it be long before there is an opportunity of making a 
better guess by counting its annual rings ! 
It may not be amiss to give a glance at a few of the oaks of 
Great Britain, of which something is known regarding age as well 
as size, by way of comparison. 
On the 11th of September, 1848, (a perfectly still day,) St. 
Edmund’s Oak, a magnificent tree, which I well remember in all 
its majesty and beauty, fell at lloxne, about five miles from Biss. 
