cannon shot, the timber of the oak is superior to every other. Excepting the sap wood, the part nearest the bark, which is not properly matured, it is very durable, whether in air, in earth, or in water; and it is said that no insects in the island will eat into the heart of oak, as they do, sooner or later, into most of the domestic and many of the foreign kinds of timber.

Important as the oak is now in the arts, there was a period in the history of Britain when it was valued principally for its acorns. It is not recorded that acorns were ever used as human food in this country, though they were so used, and are still said to be, by the poorer peasants in the south of Europe. Cervantes, in his romance of Don Quixote, not only sets them before the goatherds as a dainty, but picks out the choicest as a dessert for the Countess herself. The oaks with edible acorns are not, however, of the same species as the English oak. The Italian oak, which

Virgil represents as the monarch of the forest, and of the elevation of whose top, the stedfastness of whose roots, and of whose triumph in its greenness over the lapse of ages, he gives a splendid description in the second book of his Georgics, bore fruit which was used as food. The Quercus ilex (the evergreen oak), which is still common in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, in Syria, in the south of France, and on the shores of the Mediterranean, bears a fruit, which, in its agreeable flavour, resembles nuts. It is a slow-growing tree, and is always found single, and not in clumps. There is another evergreen oak, Quercus ballota, very common in Spain and Barbary, of which the acorns are most abundant and nutritive. During the late war in Spain, the French armies were fortunate in finding subsistence upon the ballota acorns, in the woods of Salamanca. We are often startled by the assertions of ancient writers, that the acorn, in the early periods of society, formed the principal food of mankind. Much of our surprise would have ceased had we distinguished between the common acorn, and that of the Ilex, Ballota, and Esculus oaks. Some of the classic authors speak of the fatness of the primitive inhabitants of Greece and southern Europe, who, living in the forests which were planted by the hand of Nature, were supported almost wholly upon the fruit of the oak. The Grecian poets and historians called these people balanophagi (eaters of acorns); but then the Greek word balanos, which the Romans translated glans (acorn), applied also to such fruits as dates, nuts, beech-mast, and olives. These all contain large quantities of oil, which renders them particularly nutritive.

Whether the custom existed among the ancient Britons, or (as is more probable) was imported by the Saxons who came from the thick oak-forests of Germany, it is certain that, during the time when

they held sway in this country, the fattening of hogs upon acorns in the forests was accounted so important a branch of domestic economy, that, at about the close of the seventh century, King Ina enacted the panage laws for its regulation. The fruit of the oak then formed gifts to kings, and part of the dowries of queens. So very important was it, indeed, that the failure of the acorn crop is recorded as one of the principal causes of famine. One of the most vexatious acts of William the Conqueror, in his passion for converting the whole of the forests into huntinggrounds, was that of restricting the people from fattening their hogs; and this restriction was one of the grievances which King John was called upon to redress at the triumph of Runnemede, where his assembled subjects compelled him to sign Magna Charta. It is to be observed that swine's flesh was the principal food of most nations in the earlier stages of civilization; and this is to be attributed to the extreme rapidity with which the hog species multiply.

Up to a recent period, large droves of hogs were fattened upon the acorns of the New Forest, in Hampshire, under the guidance of swineherds, who collected the herds together every night by the sound of a horn. At the present time, the hogs of Estremadura are principally fed upon the acorns of the Ballota oak; and to this cause is assigned the great delicacy of their flesh.

The history of the importance of the oak as timber nearly keeps pace with that of ship-building; and there is little doubt that, from the time of Alfred, who first gave England a navy capable of contending with her enemies upon the sea, to that of Nelson (about nine hundred years afterwards), in whom nautical skill appears to have been raised to the greatest possible height, the oak was the principal and essential material in ship-building. It has been stated that

the inferiority of some of our more recently built ships, and the ravages which the dry rot is making among them, have arisen from the substitution of foreign oak for that of native growth. A writer in a recent number of the Quarterly Review has ascribed this evil to the substitution of a foreign species of oak, in our own plantations, instead of continuing the true native tree*. In the same way, the real Scotch fir has been gradually superseded by a very inferior species, bearing the same name. It is highly probable, however, that the cultivation of some species, both of oak and of other trees, in richer soils and less exposed situations than are favourable to their greatest perfection, may produce this degeneracy. The following extract from the work of a distinguished planter, Sir Henry Steuart, offers some interesting illustrations of this circumstance:

"The common oak in Italy and Spain, where it grows faster than in Britain, is ascertained to be of shorter duration in those countries. In the same way, the oak in the highland mountains of Scotland or Wales is of a much harder and closer grain, and therefore more durable, than what is found in England; though on such mountains it seldom rises to the fifth part, or less, of the English tree. Every carpenter in Scotland knows the extraordinary difference between the durability of highland oak, and oak usually imported from England, for the spokes of wheels. Every extensive timber dealer is aware of the superior hardness of oak raised in Cumberland and Yorkshire over that of Monmouthshire and Herefordshire; and such a dealer, in selecting trees in the same woods in any district, will always give the preference to oak of slow growth, and found on cold and clayey soils,

*Some of the most eminent botanists and planters deny the. accuracy of this statement; and we therefore omit the extract which we gave in the first edition of this work..

and to ash on rocky cliffs; which he knows to be the soils and climates natural to both. If he take a cubic foot of park oak and another of forest oak, and weigh the one against the other (or if he do the like with ash or elm of the same descriptions), the latter will uniformly turn out the heavier of the two*."

When the oak stands alone, it is a spreading rather than an elevated tree; in that situation the timber is said to be more compact and firm, and the crooked arms of the trees are better adapted for ship-building than when the trees are close together. In thickly planted groups, the oak will reach an elevation of eighty or a hundred feet before it begins to decay; and in some of the choicer trees, forty, fifty, or even sixty feet may be found without a single lateral branch, and of such diameter that, even at the smaller extremity, they will square to eighteen inches or two feet. These are as well adapted for beams and planking as the others are for crooked timbers; and, therefore, in order to secure a proper supply, not only for maritime, but for domestic purposes, it is desirable to have them in both situations.

The trunk of the detached oak acquires by far the greater diameter; some of the old hollow trees, most of which are of this description, having a diameter of as much as sixteen feet in the cavity, and still a shell of timber on the outside, sufficiently vigorous for producing leaves, and even acorns. The age to which the oak can continue to vegetate, even after the core has decayed, has not been fully ascertained. But, in favourable situations, it must be very considerable. In the New Forest, Evelyn counted, in the sections of some trees, three hundred or four hundred concentric rings or layers of wood, each of which must have recorded a year's growth. The same celebrated planter mentions oaks in Donnington Park, near Newbury, once the residence of Chaucer, which could *Planter's Guide, p. 476.