Of the Oak (called Quercus, in Latin) there are fourteen species described by Linnæus. During the last fifty years, so much attention has been paid to this important tree by travellers distinguished for their researches in natural history, that a surprising addition has been made to the number of known species. Professor Martyn, in his edition of Miller's Gardener's Dictionary, enumerates twenty-six; Willdenow, who wrote in 1805, describes seventy-six; and Persoon, another eminent naturalist of the same date, enumerates eighty-two. At present we have more than a hundred and forty species described by different writers; and of these more than one half belong to America. Twenty-six species were discovered in North America by two indefatigable naturalists, father and son, named Michaux; and Humboldt and Bonpland have mentioned twenty-four others, which they found during the course of their travels in South America. Of the various species of oak, some may be classed with shrubs, others with the most majestic trees of the forest; some are evergreens, and others are deciduous, or lose their leaves during the winter. The species from which the best timber is derived, which is by far the most abundant in Britain, and a native of it, is the COMMON OAK (Quercus robur).

The cut opposite exhibits the leaf, flower, and fruit (the type) of this tree. We shall introduce the same mode of illustration in other instances.

The oak timber imported from America is much inferior to that of the common oak of England: the oak from the central parts of continental Europe is also inferior, especially in compactness and resistance of cleavage. The knotty oak of England, the " unwedgeable and gnarled oak," as Shakspeare called it, -and in these two words described its leading properties better than all the botanists, when cut down at a proper age, (from fifty to seventy years,)

is really the best timber that is known. Some timber is harder, some more difficult to rend, and some less capable of being broken across; but none contains all the three qualities in so great and so equal proportions; and thus, for at once supporting a weight, resisting a strain, and not splintering by a 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 is more than probable 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; and the reason in each case appears to have been, that the seed of the spurious kind is much more plentiful, and grows more easily, than that of the real species. We subjoin the passage to which we have alluded:

"We may here notice a fact long known to botanists, but of which our planters and purveyors of timber appear to have had no suspicion, that there are two distinct species of oak in England, the Quercus robur, and the Quercus sessiliflora; the former of which affords a close-grained, firm, solid timber, rarely subject to rot; the other more loose and sappy, very liable to rot, and not half so durable. This difference was noticed so early as the time of Ray; and Martyn, in his Flora Rustica, and Sir James Smith, in his Flora Britannica, have added their testimonies to the fact. The second species is supposed to have been introduced, some two or three ages ago, from the continent, where the oaks are chiefly of this latter species, especially in the German forests, the timber