Neither sycamore nor plane are natives of the United Kingdom. The plane, though it excels all other trees for planting in smoky towns like London, does not take kindly to the cooler atmosphere of Scotland and northern England. Not so the sycamore, which, although naturally a product of the mountain ranges of Central and Southern Europe, nowhere flourishes more freely and sows itself more abundantly than in North Britain. Indeed, it is a conspicuous instance of the careless prodigality of Nature how thickly every bare spot in a wood becomes covered with seedling sycamores, not one in a million of which have the faintest chance of surviving two or three seasons. The life period of the sycamore is a long one, probably three times that of the beech and equal to that of the oak. At Truns, in the Swiss Oberland, a great sycamore, already in ruin, was destroyed by a storm in 1870. As it was under this tree that the Grey League, originators of the canton of Grisons, took the oath in 1424, it can scarcely have been less than 600 years old when it ceased to exist. Mr. Elwes gives the dimensions of another mighty sycamore in Switzerland, growing at an elevation of more than 4000 feet in the canton of Unterwalden, which must be coeval with the tree of the Grey League. It measures 29 feet in circumference at 5 feet from the ground. We cannot quite equal that in Scotland, although in that country and northern England there are some enormous sycamores. Behind the Birnam Hotel stand two very large trees, an oak and a sycamore. The oak, lesser of the two, is shown to visitors as the last survivor of that forest whereof it was said Macbeth shall never vanquished be Until great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him. [Illustration: SYCAMORE IN WINTER] The other is a giant sycamore, reported in Hunter's _Woods and Forests of Perthshire_ (1883) to be one thousand years old, which, of course, is impossible. I measured the girth of this great tree in 1903, and made it 19 feet 8 inches at 5 feet from the ground. It was not until long after that I found that Hunter had given exactly the same measurement twenty years earlier. This girth is exceeded by one at Castle Menzies, which, in 1904, gave 20 feet 4 inches. The loftiest sycamore reported in Scotland is also in Perthshire, at Blair Drummond. This tree Dr. Henry ascertained to be 108 feet high, with a girth of 10 feet. At Kippenross, also in Perthshire, there remain fragments of a sycamore destroyed by lightning in 1860. It was known in the seventeenth century as "the Muckle Tree o' Kippenross," and was estimated in 1821 to contain 875 cubic feet of timber.