FRUIT OF YEW (_Taxus baccata_) 206 IN THE YEW WOOD NEAR DOWNTON, WILTS 208 MONTEREY CYPRESS (_Cupressus macrocarpa_) 214 AT WAKEHURST PLACE DECIDUOUS CYPRESS (_Taxodium distichum_) 216 AT SYON GINGKO BILOBA 228 AT THE GROVE, WATFORD AVENUE OF ARAUCARIA IMBRICATA 232 AT CASTLE KENNEDY, WIGTOWNSHIRE ARAUCARIA IMBRICATA, MALE FLOWER 234 ARAUCARIA IMBRICATA, FEMALE FLOWER 234 The Oak The literature of the oak far exceeds in volume that of any other tree, and there is abundant evidence to prove that from earliest times it was regarded not only with esteem for its timber, but with religious reverence. Popular names of trees are uncertain guides; the revisers of the Old Testament express a doubt whether the tree under which Jacob buried the strange gods which he took from his household (Genesis xxxv. 4) was really an oak, as it is rendered in the authorised version, or a terebinth; but there seems to be no question about the tree Homer had in his mind when he describes Zeus as giving his oracles from the oaks of Dodona (_Odyssey_, xiv. 328), for the Greeks held the oak sacred to their premier deity. Pliny (A.D. 23-79), writing about a thousand years later than Homer, describes in detail the religious honour paid to the oak in Britain, and asserts that the Druids, as children of the oak, were so called from the Greek name for that tree, i.e. δρυς. We are able to check his statements in one particular from our own experience. He says that the Druids held the mistletoe as the most sacred of plants, provided it grew upon an oak, which it did very rarely. It is still so seldom to be seen on that tree that, although I have been on the lookout for an instance for many years, both in England and in Continental oak forests, I have never yet found one. Mr. Elwes, indeed, gives a list of twenty-three oaks in England reputed as bearing mistletoe; but he has only succeeded in verifying two of these by personal inspection.[2]