Dr. Prior, in his excellent work on the _Popular Names of British Plants_ (1879), argued confidently that the names "yew" and "ivy" were but different forms of the same word; but the late Professor Skeat declined to admit that there was any connection between them. It is an elusive element in English place-names; Yeovil in Somerset being assigned to a totally different origin. Yeoford, in Devon, has been variously written Uford and Yewford, and may possibly be named from a yew tree, and so may Uffculme in the same county. The Gaelic _iubhar_ (pronounced "yure") is more easily recognised in the suffix -ure or -nure to many Irish and Scottish place-names. For instance, Gortinure, near Londonderry, is written _Gort-an-iubhair_ in the _Annals of the Four Masters_; Glenure in Argyll and Palnure in Galloway are respectively the glen and stream (_pol_) of the yews. The word is more closely disguised in Newry, County Down; but that name is explained in the aforesaid _Annals_ as derived from a yew planted by St. Patrick himself, whence the monastery founded there was called _Iubhar-cinn-trachta_, the yew near high tide-mark. The name was shortened into an-Iubharach, whence the transition was easy to Newry. In Galloway, Palnure is the stream of the yews, and in Ayrshire Dunure is the fort of the yew-tree. The Cypress and its Kin Among all the green things that clothe this wonderful globe--that globe which man strives so desperately to unclothe that he may pile upon it leagues of bricks and mortar, defile it with the smoke of myriad furnaces, burrow in it in pursuit of pelf to pay for still more bricks, mortar and furnaces--among these green things, I say, no group bears the badge of clanship more openly than the Cypresses (_Cupressineæ_), a branch of the great order of Conifers. It contains but a single species indigenous to the British Isles, namely, the common juniper (_Juniperus communis_), which cannot aspire to rank among forest trees. Agriculture and mineral industry have extirpated it in many districts where it once abounded; but it is still a characteristic feature in the landscape on some of the English chalk downs, in East Anglia, the Scottish Highlands, western Ireland, and other places where it has been allowed to survive. Near Capenoch, in Dumfriesshire, there remains a broad hillside thickly covered with juniper, which seems to have been the chief growth there from immemorial time. [Illustration: MONTEREY CYPRESS (_Cupressus macrocarpa_) AT WAKEHURST PLACE]