- [Footnote: Braborne, in the county of Kent, thirty centuries; to the
Scotch yew of Fortingal, from twenty-five to twenty-six; and to those of Crowhurst in Surrey, and Ripon in Yorkshire, respectively, fourteen and a half and twelve centuries. (Decandolle, de la longévité des arbres, p. 65.) Endlicher remarks that the age of another yew tree, in the Churchyard of Grasford, in North Wales, which measures 52 English feet in circumference below the branches, is estimated at 1400 years, and that of a yew in Derbyshire at 2096 years. In Lithuania lime trees have been cut down which were 87 English feet in circumference, and in which 815 annual rings have been counted." (Endlicher, Grundzüge der Botanik, S. 399.) In the temperate zone of the southern hemisphere some species of Eucalyptus attain an enormous girth, and as they also reach to a great stature (above 230 Paris, 245 English, feet), they are singularly contrasted with our yew trees, whose great dimension is in thickness only. Mr. Backhouse found in Emu Bay, on the coast of Van Diemen Land, trunks of Eucalyptus which measured 70 English feet round the trunk near the ground, and five feet higher up 50 English feet. (Gould, Birds of Australia, Vol. I. Introd. p. xv.)
It is not, as is commonly stated, Malpighi, but the ingenious Michel Montaigne, who has the merit of having been the first, in 1581, in his Voyage en Italie, to notice the relation of the annual rings to the age of the tree. (Adrien de Jussieu, Cours élémentaire de Botanique, 1840, p. 61.) A skilful artist, engaged in the preparation of astronomical instruments, had called the attention of Mon-*]*
