Various

“ All calculations of the age of a tree, founded merely on the size of its trunk, are, however, uncertain, unless the law of its growth, and the limits of the variation producible by peculiar circumstances, are ascertained, which, in the case of the Adansonia, have not been determined. ”

“ It thus contains a body of annotations, which express the condition of human knowledge and the state of the world's industry in 1851: and is a document of the utmost importance, as a summary report of this vast international 'stock-taking,' which no great library—nor any gentleman's library, of those who aim at the collection of literary standards—can hereafter be without. It is not the work of a day, a month, or a year: it is for all time. Centuries hence it will be referred to as an authority on the condition to which man has arrived at the period of its publication. ”

“ Can any of your correspondents state what is the greatest number of rings which have been actually counted in any yew, or other tree, which has grown in the British Isles, or elsewhere? It Is only by actual enumeration that vegetable chronology can be satisfactorily determined: but if the rings in many trees were counted, some relation between the number of rings and the diameter of the trunk, for each species, might probably be laid down within certain limits. ”

“ There is in this town a little girl, about thirteen years old, in great request among the poor as a charmer in cases of burns or scalds. Immediately on the accident the girl is fetched from her work in the mill; on her arrival she kneels down by the side of the sufferer, mutters a few words, and touches the individual, and the people believe and affirm that the sufferings immediately cease, as she has charmed the fire out of the parts injured. ”

“ Query, on what authority do these statements rest? Marshall thinks that a duration of nearly a thousand years may be fairly assigned to the Tortworth tree; and he adds:
"If we consider the quick growth of the chestnut, compared with that of the oak, and at the same time the inferior bulk of the Tortworth Chestnut to the Cowthorp, the Bentley, and the Boddington oaks, may we not venture to infer that the existence of these truly venerable trees commenced some centuries prior to the era of Christianity?" ”

“ Of a great elm growing at Chipstead Place in Kent, he says: "Its appearance altogether savours enough of antiquity to bear out the tradition annexed to it, that in the time of Henry V. a fair was held annually under its branches; the high road from Rye in Sussex to London then passing close by it." (P. 5.) If this tradition be authentic, the elm in question must have been a large and wide-spreading tree in the years 1413-22. A yew-tree at Ankerwyke House, near Staines, is supposed to be of great antiquity. ”

“ It is, however, important that such historical evidence should be carefully scrutinised; for trees which are known to be of great antiquity sometimes give rise to fabulous legends, destitute of any foundation in fact. Such, for example, was the plane-tree near Caphyæ, in Arcadia, seen by Pausanias in the second century after Christ, which was reported by the inhabitants to have been planted by Menelaus when he was collecting the army for the expedition against Troy. (Paus. VIII. 23.) Such too, doubtless, was the oak of Mamre, where the angels were said to have appeared to Abraham. ”

“ The work is without a precedent in the annals of literature; and when we regard the circumstances of difficulty that surrounded the task of its execution, the praise bestowed on those who undertook it can scarcely be too great. The Contractors, in that enlarged spirit which appears to have entered into all that belongs to the Exhibition, engaged men of reputation and authority in every department of science and manufacture to contribute such descriptive notes as should render the work currently instructive. ”

“ Unfortunately this mode of determining a tree's age cannot be applied to a living tree; and it is only certain where the tree is sound at the heart. Where a tree has become hollow from old age, the rings near the centre, which constitute a part of the evidence of its duration, no longer exist. Hence the age of the great oak of Saintes, in the department of the Charente Inférieure, which measures twenty-three feet in diameter five feet from the ground, and is large enough to contain a small chamber, can only be estimated ”

“ For the same reason, the calculation of 2,500 years for a gigantic cypress in Persia, mentioned by Evelyn in his Silva, is of no value.
Humboldt afterwards refers to "the more certain estimations yielded by annular rings, and by the relation found to exist between the thickness of the layer of wood and the duration of growth;" which, he adds, give us shorter periods for our temperate northern zone. The calculation of the age of a tree, founded on its successive rings, appears to be quite certain; and whenever these can be counted, the age of a tree can be determined without risk of error. ”

“ It is of most painful interest, for it paints in vivid colours the misery, ignorance, and demoralisation in which thousands are living at our very doors; and its perusal must awaken in every right-minded man an earnest desire to do his part towards assisting the endeavours of the honest poor to earn their bread—towards instructing the ignorant, and towards reforming the vicious. ”

“ These rings, being annually deposited, form a natural chronicle of time, by which the age of a tree is determined with as much precision as the lapse of human events is determined by the cotemporaneous registration of annalists. Hence Milton speaks of "monumental oak." Evelyn, who has devoted a long chapter of his Silva to an investigation of the age of trees (b. iii. c. iii.) , founds his inferences chiefly on their size; but he cites the following remark from Dr. Goddard:
"It is commonly and very probably asserted, that a tree gains a new ring every year. ”

“ The oaks here alluded to by Marshall are of immense size. The Cowthorp Oak is near Wetherby; the Bentley Oak, in Holt Forest, near Bentley; the Boddington Oak, between Cheltenham and Tewksbury (vol. ii. pp. 127. 298.) .
Perhaps some of your correspondents may be able to point out authentic evidence respecting the true dates of ancient trees. A large tree is a subject of interest to the entire neighbourhood: it receives an individual name, like a river, a mountain, or a building; and by its permanence it affords a fixed point for a faithful local tradition to rest upon. ”

“ Tegg in 1845 printed an edition of this Schola Cordis as the production of Francis Quarles; what was his authority I know not, he certainly did not attempt to give any.
The last three books of Quarles's Emblems contain forty-five prints, all from Herman Hugo's Pia Desideria, which has that number of emblems. Quarles sometimes translates, sometimes paraphrases Hugo, and has a good deal of original matter. His first two books are not in Hugo's work, and I do not know whence they are derived; nearly all the cuts contain a globe and cross. ”

“ With much seeming negligence, and perhaps in later years some real relaxation, he understands more and remembers more about common and uncommon subjects of literature, than many of those who would be thought to read all the day and meditate half the night. ”

“ List of Notes and Queries volumes and pages
Notes. AGE OF TREES.
Alexander von Humboldt, in his work entitled Views of Nature (pp. 220. 268-276. ed. Bohn) , has some interesting remarks on the age of trees.
"In vegetable forms (he says) massive size is indicative of age; and in the vegetable kingdom alone are age and the manifestation of an ever-renewed vigour linked together."
Following up this remark, he refers to specimens of the Baobab (Adansonia digitata) , with trunks measuring more than thirty feet in diameter, the age of which is estimated by Adanson at 5150 years. ”

“ Herman Hugo had the talents and versatility which characterise his order (the Order of Jesus) , "he was a philosopher, a linguist, a theologian, a poet, and a soldier, and under the command of Spinola is said to have performed prodigies of valour." He was the author of De prima Scribendi Origine et Universa Rei Literariæ Antiquitate, an excellent work; and of De Militia Equestri antiqua et nova amongst others. His Book of Emblems was first published at Antwerp, 1624. It is divided into three books, viz.,
Pia Desideria. ”

“ Decandolle lays it down that, of all European trees, the yew attains the greatest age; and he assigns an antiquity of thirty centuries to the Taxus baccata of Braburn in Kent; from twenty-five to thirty centuries to the Scotch yew of Fortingal; and fourteen and a half and twelve centuries respectively to those of Crowhurst in Surrey and Ripon (Fountains Abbey) in Yorkshire. These [402] ages are fixed by a conjecture founded on the size, which can lead to no certain result. ”

“ This new edition is accompanied by a long preface or dissertation containing many particulars relating to the authoress and her relatives, and to a number of ladies of high station and polished education, who during the period intervening between the Reformation in England and the Revolution in 1688, distinguished themselves by publishing works characterized by exalted piety and refined taste. With regard to Mrs. Joceline, no printed work appears to have preserved correct information. Genealogists seem to have conspired to change her Christian name from Elizabeth to Mary or Jane. ”

“ Though too late in the day to obtain these details from actual observation, enough may be recorded or remembered through others, to assist in throwing light on the rules and customs of past days, which never can be deficient in interest while they tend to illustrate the habits and character of great men. ”

“ This oak is above twenty-two feet in girth; it is hollow, and stag-headed; and, so far as can be judged from the engraving, has an appearance of great antiquity, though its age only reaches back to the sixteenth century. (P. 27.) The Tortworth Chestnut is described as being not only the largest, but the oldest tree in England: Evelyn alleges that "it continued a signal boundary to that manor in King Stephen's time, as it stands [403] upon record;" but the date of the record is not mentioned. ”

“ To satisfy the deep interest taken by many persons, who are unable to study the phenomena themselves, in the numerous new and remarkable facts relating to the formation and temperature of the globe, and to the movements of the ocean and of the atmosphere, as well as to the influence of both on climate, and on the adaptation of the earth for the dwelling of man, which the exertions of scientific men have of late years revealed, was the motive which led Professor Buff to write his Familiar Letters on the Physics of the Earth ”

“ The ash at Carnock, in Stirlingshire, supposed to be the largest in Scotland, and still a luxuriant tree, was planted about the year 1596, by Sir Thomas Nicholson of Carnock, Lord Advocate of Scotland in the reign of James VI. (Ib. p. 8.)
Marshall, in his Work on Planting and Rural Ornament (2 vols. 1796) refers to a paper on the age of trees, by Mr. Marsham, in the first volume of the Transactions of the Bath Agriculture Society, in which the Tortworth Chestnut is calculated to be not less than 1100 years old. ”

“ The girl affirms that she found it out herself by reading her Bible, of which the wonder-working charm is a verse. She will take no reward, nor may any of her relatives; if she or they were, her power would be at an end. She is an ordinary, merry, playful girl; as a surgeon I often come across her in such accidents.
I know some other such charmers in Cheshire, but none so young. One, an old man, stops bleedings of all kinds by a similar charm, viz. a verse from the Bible. ”

“ It will be evident from what has been already stated that a more important contribution to a commercial country than the 'Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition' could scarcely have been offered.... All possible means have been taken to render it worthy of the wonderful gathering of which it is the permanent record."—Athenæum. ”

“ Panelling Inscription.
—I have recently discovered, in my investigations for the History and Antiquities of South Lynn, an old building in this town which bears the date 1605 on one of its gables; and in the course of my peregrinations through, I find some old panelling with the date 1676, and the following inscription in old English (large) characters:
"As nothinge is so absolutly blest
But chance may crosse, and make it seeming ill,
So nothinge cane a man so much molest,
But God may chang, and seeing good he will." ”

“ As to Wolfe's having been "the youngest general ever intrusted with such a responsible command" as that at Quebec, your correspondent surely forgets Napoleon in modern, and the Black Prince in more remote times.
I have seen at Mr. Scott's, of Cahircon, in the co. Clare, an engraving of Wolfe: he is designated as the "Hero of Louisburgh," and is represented with his right to the spectator, the right hand and arm raised as if enforcing an order. The features are small, the nose rather "cocked," and the face conveys the idea of spirit and determination ”