As, then, the healing of the child would seem to depend upon that of the tree, this potent charm is not always successful, as may be gathered from the fact that young trees have been met with which never healed at all, and we recollect one of these, of which the accompanying wood-cut is a copy, having been presented at a Conversazione of the Worcestershire Natural History Society. The tree from whence it was taken was of about ten years of age. Selby says that an instance of this use of the ash is “related by the Rev. T. Bree, in the _Magazine of Natural History_, where a ruptured child was made to pass through the chasm of a young ash-tree, split for the purpose, in Warwickshire.” [Illustration] These facts seem to point to the acting upon such superstitions to within a comparatively recent period, though doubtless the drawing a child beneath the stolon or shoot of a bramble that has rooted at its extremity, and which we have known to be gravely recommended by a wise (!) woman, would be equally efficacious, and, upon the whole, easier to perform. Evelyn further says that “the chemists exceedingly commend the seed of the ash to be an admirable remedy for the stone.” “But,” he adds, “whether by the power of magic or nature, I determine not.” We would suggest that it was by the power its roots possess of riving the natural rock. So stone-crop, from decomposing the stones on which it grows, was held to have the like effect. How strange, then, it is that with such evidences of the truth of the motto,— Similia similibus curantur, physicians of the present day should refuse to listen to this still (and very small) voice of nature, and not all become homœopaths! Such may well be the reasoning of many an old woman who still pretends to cures either by magic spells or infinitesimal globules. Two interesting varieties of ash are met with: the pendulous or weeping-ash, which, Sir W. Hooker informs us, is said to have been first discovered in a field at Gamlingay, and the _Fraxinus heterophylla_, in which the leaf is simple, that is, it is in one piece, more the form of a laurel-leaf than the usual pinnated ash-leaf. These variations are easily perpetuated by grafting, and are here only mentioned on account of their peculiar habits. * * * * * THE BEECH (_Fagus sylvatica_) is admitted by all authors to be a native of Great Britain, and if the many magnificent giants one here and there meets with be admitted as proofs of indigenous origin, few trees can put in a more imposing claim. The celebrated Burnham beeches, so well known to artists and lovers of nature in general, and the many fine examples of this tree in the Cotteswolds, upon which range it is said to grow as a weed, testify to the age and size to which the beech may attain.