The beech is an encroaching tree. Wherever it is capable of thriving, it tends to replace the oak, which has lost, apparently, a great part of its old propagative energy. Possibly its exposure to the attacks of countless insect-enemies, from which the beech enjoys immunity, may account for its comparative helplessness in the battle for life. The beech is, at any rate, now the typical tree of central Europe; it has aided in the extirpation of the ancient oak-forests of Jutland, and has established itself, within the historic period, in Scotland and Ireland.[192] Its habitat is, however, bounded to the east by a line drawn from Königsberg on the Baltic to the Caucasus; it is not found in the Troad, or in Greece south of a track crossing the peninsula from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Volo. It grows freely, however, on the slopes of the Mysian Olympus, as well as on Mount Pelion in Thessaly. At the beginning of the Macedonian era, too, Dicæarchus[193] described the thick foliage of Pelion as prevalently beechen, though cypresses, silver firs, junipers, and maples, also abounded, the last three kinds of tree having since disappeared, while the beech seems to have only just held its ground.[194] Its relative importance, then, five hundred years earlier, is not likely to have been very different; yet Homer, who certainly knew a good deal about Pelion, whether by report, or from observation, never mentions the beech. It is true that we cannot argue with any confidence from omission to ignorance. An epic is not an encyclopædia. The illustrations employed in it are not necessarily exhaustive of all that the poet’s world contains. We can, then, be certain of nothing more than that Homer’s idea of a typical forest did not include the beech. Its appearance, then, in the following spirited lines from Mr. Way’s excellent translation of the Iliad, has no warrant in the original, where the third kind of tree mentioned is the _phegos_, or valonia-oak. And as when the East-wind and South-wind in stormy contention strive In the glens of a mountain, a deep dark forest to rend and rive, Scourging the smooth-stemmed cornel-tree, and the beech and the ash, While against each other their far-spreading branches swing and dash With unearthly din, and ever the shattering limbs of them crash.[195] Footnote 192: Selby, _History of British Forest Trees_, pp. 309, 319. Footnote 193: Müller, _Geographi Græci minores_, t. i. p. 106. Footnote 194: Tozer, _Researches in the Highlands of Turkey_, vol. ii. pp. 122-23. Footnote 195: Way’s _Iliad_, xvi. 765-69.