This digression into etymology brings to mind another word connected with the spruce fir, namely "deal," which owns to one of the most remarkable etymologies in our language. Although it has not been traced to its original root, it exists in all branches of Teutonic speech, always in the sense of a share or division. It also occurs in Gaelic as _dal_, signifying a portion of land, as Dalnaspidal--the land portion of the hospital; Dalrymple (_dal chruim puil_, the farm of the crooked pool--on the Doon), and so on. The Anglo-Saxon _dæl_ meant a portion, a share; whence we use the word in phrases such as "a deal of cards," "a great deal,"[18] and have applied it to express the planks into which a tree is "divided," or sawn up. From a Scandinavian source we get another form of the word "dale," meaning a valley, as Tweeddale, Annandale, etc.; for in Norway one dale or valley is "divided" from another by mountains. The Cedar "The cedar stoops not to the base shrub's foot, But low shrubs wither at the cedar's foot." Shakespeare's _Lucrece_, 664. The frequency with which Shakespeare mentions the cedar can only be explained as the action of a far-ranging intellect, beholding things through the eyes of travellers, and weaving hearsay into vivid imagery. He had, indeed, scriptural authority for assigning to the cedar royal pre-eminence among trees. "Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches.... The cedars in the garden of God could not hide him; the fir trees were not like his boughs, and the chestnut trees were not like his branches, nor any tree in the garden of God was like unto him in beauty.... So that all the trees of Eden that were in the garden of God envied him." (Ezekiel, xxxi., 3, 8, 9.) But Shakespeare himself never set eyes upon a cedar: for Evelyn, writing fifty years after his death, could but deplore that there were no cedars in England--"I conceive," says he, "from our want of industry." He says that he had raised seedlings, perhaps from the first cones brought to this country. Howbeit, once this noble tree was established with us, it throve amain, and it is now as familiar an adjunct to English manor houses as the yew is to churchyards.