Los Angeles herald., 1908-08-02
LITERARY GAzINE SECTION

The old oak at Cowthorpe, Yorks, measures six
teen yards in circumference as DR.. Hunter notices
Evelyn, SylUG). An oak of considerable magni-
tude and great age is drawn by Hone growing
out of the wall of Boxey Abbey, Kent In Ches-
hunt Herts, a gigantic oak said to have been
planted by Sir Theodore Godfrey who came over
in 1866. MoXon has a sonnet on it ("Year Book,
1850, 239 1881 Herrick notices the custom of
oak decorations at Christmas:
Green Bushes then and sweetest Bents
With cooler Oxen boughs." (E. d. B.. 2O6).
The origin and rise of oak groves for religious
purposes from Naoh and Abraham, and the great
prevalence of the custom in Palestine has been
pointed out protestant Observer January, Febru-
ary), where the same feeling that Thomson
expresses
"Welcome We shades! We bowery thickets, hail!
We lofty pines! we venerable oaks!"
The oak was connected with Palestine to the last
and on a coin of Herod Antipas is an oak wreath
(Madden.)
Morrison says: abraham himself planted an oak
(the tree of Ell, the Irradator) a grove, beside
the altar Of the Lord. They burn incense upon the
hills, under oaks (the trees of the irradiator)'
C'Religious History of Man" 1885, PIP. PAS, 25),
thus suggesting a reason why the oak was selected
for religious use.
Chambers mentions the Mamma oak of Kurdshan
which secretes in hot weather a kind of mamma
used for sweetmeats ("Encyclopedia 1865 vii 49,;
and a learned writer mentions mamma being
found oak leaves of Sicily ('Truths of Reve
lation," 1881, 1917.
OAK NAMES AND TREES.
The intercourse between Palestine and Britain
in early times doubt very considerable
Solomon obtained the tin for the Temple vessels
from Cornwall Learned Jewish Rabbis consider
that the aforementioned isles in the prophecies
refer to the British Isles. Druidism was the pre-
vailing religion, and this has been traced. by
Stukeley and Others to the Hebrew Patriarchs
We may therefore naturally expect to find the
Hebrew religious oak groves in Britain; and this
was remarkably the case.
Martineau gives some interesting particulars:
at is remarkable that Cesar nowhere makes any
mention of the sacred groves and the reverence
paid to the oak, which makes great figure in
most of the other accounts of Druidism Among
various deriyatons which have been given of the
name of the Druids the most probable seems to
be that which brings it from Dr7ti, the Celtic
word for an oak corruptly written in the modern
Irish Droi and more corruptly Drdoi. but without
the pronunciation being altered, and making in
the plural Druidhe Drui is the same word with
DruS which signifies an oak in the Greek Ian
guage; and ALSO indeed, with the English tree
which in the old Mesogothic was trim. Pliny in
forms us that the oak was the tree which they
principally venerated, that they chose groves of
oak for their residence and performed no sacred
rites without the leaf of that tree Within little
more than a century, ancient oaks still stand
ing around some of the Druidical circles of stones
set upright in the EARTH which are supposed to
have been the temples of the old religion"
But the most remarkable of the Druidical super
stitons connected with the oak was the reverence
paid to the parasitical plant called the mistletoe,
when it was found growing on that tree. Pliny
having told that the Druids believed that God
loved the oak above all the other trees and that
everything growing upon that tree came from
heaven, he adds that there is nothing they held
sacred than the mistletoe of the oak"
DR.. Thorn notices that the oak and thorn,
objects