THE AGE OF TREES.
. Almost everyone who possesses an old tree, whether as his own property or as the booty of his eyes, wonders what its age may be and is tempted to exaggerate its years. There should therefore be a very large public who would like to ex- press their gratitude to the Forestry Commission for their difficult research into the age of the Burnham Beeches, which actually form the greatest and oldest collection of these trees in the wide world. Indeed, it is not easy to select any group of any sort of tree that has more character. The hollowed trunks have the queer grotesqueness of gargoyles ; and it seems a thing impossible that such gnarled and misshapen lumps of, sapless desiccation could bear so great a crown of vigorous boughs. They were all pollarded, it is written, solely for the sake of the greater mass of fuel that a tree so cut is capable of producing. Probably the pollarding increases the length of life of the tree, but even so the oldest of these Burnham Beeches has not seen more than three hundred and sixty summers. The evidence appears to be precise within a margin of some ten years at most.
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