Our first wonder tree is notable only for its great age and vast size. It is the Cowthorpe oak of Yorkshire, England. John Evelyn, the pleasing writer and true gentleman of Charles Second’s time, celebrates this oak in his book called “Sylva.” This noble tree is fully fifteen hundred years old. Not the oldest tree in the world then, for some of the olives in Gethsemane, near Jerusalem, are supposed to be older than that by several hundred years. The girth of the Cowthorpe oak at the ground is seventy-eight feet. Forty persons can stand inside its hollow hole. One of its main branches broke off in a gale, and being cut up, yielded five tons of timber. In Evelyn’s time the branches shaded half an acre of ground. The circumference of this tree is greater than that of the Eddystone light-house. That famous light-house was modelled after an oak tree, as giving the best pattern of a well-rooted, firmly resisting column. This Cowthorpe oak is not the largest tree in the world. There is a tree in South America with a girth of one hundred and twelve feet, and a California red-wood is known that measures one hundred feet around just above the ground. The red-woods belong to an ancient order of vegetation, and doubtless it could be said of the trees of the Carboniferous, and next two or three world-building periods, “There were giants in the earth in those days.” Australia is a land of wonders, animal and vegetable, and one of its curiosities stands next in our grove--the bottle tree. The name is given because of the shape of the tree, which resembles a gigantic bottle. This tree is sixty feet high; the bark is brown, smooth, shining, like thick glass. The girth of the tree is greatest just above the root, where it is forty feet in circumference; it tapers very little until about forty feet above the ground, where it narrows suddenly into a shape like the neck of a bottle; and in this neck the branches have their base. The branches are rather the long, pliant stems of compound leaves than real branches; and the slender, numerous, small leaves give a light, feathery effect to the foliage. This leafy crown forms the fantastic cork, or stopper, of this quaint bottle. The leaf-stalks rise and then bend over in a dome, or umbrella shape. The bottle trees grow in groves of about thirty each, and stand a hundred feet apart, as regularly as if planted by the hand of a gardener. Be careful and do not tread on our next tree, the very pigmy of trees; perfect in root, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, fruit,--a dwarf cherry tree from Japan. Are the trees of Japan then even more diminutive than the little, olive-skinned, and almond-eyed people? How did the skilful Japanese gardeners succeed in making this tiny tree? For it is dwarfed not by nature, but by the art of man.