"Boughs of oak with acorns were carried in marriage ceremonies, as emblems of fecundity. Sophocles, in the fragment of Rhizotomi, describes Hecates as crowned with oak leaves and serpents. Pliny relates of the oaks on the shores of the Cauchian Sea, that, undermined by the waves and propelled by the winds, they tore off with them vast masses of earth on their interwoven roots, and occasioned the greatest terror to the Romans, whose fleets encountered these floating islands. Of the Hyrcynian forest he says, "These enormous oaks, unaffected by ages and coeval with the world by a destiny almost immortal, exceed all wonder. Omitting other circumstances that might not gain belief, it is well known that hills are raised up by the encounter of the jostling roots; or where the earth may not have followed, that arches, struggling with each other, and elevated to the very branches, are curved as it were into wide gateways, able to admit the passage of whole troops of horse." "This forest is described by Cæsar as requiring sixty days to traverse it; and the remains of it are supposed by some to constitute the forest on the mountains of the Hartz; and by others to be the Black Forest of the Tyrol. The beautiful fiction of the Hamadryads is frequently referred to by the Greek poets. The Hamadryads were nymphs, each of whom was 'Doomed to a life coeval with her oak.' Callimachus, in the Hymn to Delos, represents Melia as "sighing deeply for her parent oak;" and adds-- 'Joy fills her breast when showers refresh the spray: Sadly she grieves when autumn's leaves decay.' "In Appollonius Rhodius, Book II., we find one of the Hamadryads imploring a woodman to spare the oak to which her existence is attached: "Loud through the air resounds the woodman's stroke, When lo! a voice breaks from the groaning oak. 'Spare, spare my life! a trembling virgin spare! Oh, listen to the Hamadryad's prayer! No longer let that fearful axe resound; Preserve the tree to which my life is bound! See from the bark my blood in torrents flows, I faint, I sink, I perish from your blows.'" "The oak, evidently, was an object of worship among the Celts and ancient Britons. The Celts worshipped their God Teut under the form of this tree; and the Britons regarded it as a symbol of their God Tarnawa, the god of thunder."