I. The beech, [_fagus_] (of two or three kinds) and numbred amongst the glandiferous trees, I rank here before the martial ash, because it commonly grows to a greater stature. But here I may not omit a note of the accurate critic Palmerius, upon a passage in Theophrastus,{75:1} where he animadverts upon his interpreter, and shews that the ancient Φηγὸς was by no means the beech, but a kind of oak; for that the figure of the fruit is so widely unlike it, that being round, this triangular; and both Theophrastus and Pausanias make it indeed a species of oak, (as already we have noted in cap. III.) wholly differing in trunk, as well as fruit and leaf; to which he adds (what determines the controversie) ξύλον τῆς φηγοῦ ἰσχυρότατον καὶ ἀσηπέσατον, &c. _that it is of a firmer timber, not obnoxious to the worm_; neither of which can so confidently be said of the beech. Yet La Cerda too seems guilty of the same mistake: But leaving this, there are of our _fagi_, two or three kinds with us; the mountain (where it most affects to grow) which is the whitest, and most sought after by the turner; and the campestrial or wild, which is of a blacker colour, and more durable. They are both to be rais’d from the mast, and govern’d like the oak (of which amply) and that is absolutely the best way of furnishing a wood; unless you will make a nursery, and then you are to treat the mast as you are instructed in the chapter of ashes, sowing them in autumn, or later, even after January, or rather nearer the spring, to preserve them from vermin, which are very great devourers of them. But they are likewise to be planted of young seedlings, to be drawn out of the places where the fruitful trees abound. In transplanting them, cut off only the boughs and bruised parts two inches from the stem, to within a yard of the top, but be very sparing of the root: This for such as are of pretty stature. They make spreading trees, and noble shades with their well furnish’d and glistering leaves, being set at forty foot distance, but they grow taller, and more upright in the forests, where I have beheld them at eight and ten foot, shoot into very long poles; but neither so apt for timber, nor fuel: The shade unpropitious to corn and grass, but sweet, and of all the rest, most refreshing to the weary shepherd--_lentus in umbra_, ecchoing Amaryllis with his oten pipe. Mabillon tells us in his Itinerary, of the old beech at Villambrosa, to be still flourishing, (and greener than any of the rest) under whose umbrage the famous eremit Gualbertus had his cell.