the disk develops into a red wax-like cup around the enlarging seed with its olive-green coat. The flesh of the cup is full of sweet mucilage, which makes the fruit acceptable to children, but the flavour is rather too mawkish to suit older tastes. Yew-berries are not poisonous, as sometimes supposed; neither is the contained kernel, which has a pleasant nutty flavour. Much has been said and written as to the toxic property of Yew-leaves, and it appears that though cattle and goats may browse upon them with impunity, horses and human beings pay the penalty of death for such indulgence. That word toxic, by the way, owes its significance to the Yew. The tree was named taxus in Latin, from the Greek toxon (a bow), because of the ancient repute of its wood for making that instrument. The tree was held to be
poisonous, and so its name in the form of toxicum came to designate all poisons.
There are some lines in In Memoriam which many readers of Tennyson have found as obscure as the shade of the Yew where they were conceived. The poet is addressing a venerable churchyard Yew in these words:—
"Old warder of these buried bones,
And answering now my random stroke
With fruitful cloud and living smoke;
Dark Yew, that graspest at the stones
And dippest towards the dreamless dead,
To thee, too, comes the golden hour,
When flower is feeling after flower."
To any readers who have found a difficulty in understanding these lines, we would say: visit the Yew groves in February or March, when the male branches are thickly covered with their yellow flowers, and strike a branch with your stick. In response to the "random stroke" the pollen will fly off in a "fruitful cloud" or "living smoke," some of it to be caught by the minute female blossoms. This is the Yew-tree's "golden hour, when flower is feeling after flower."
In the pre-gunpowder era, so important was it to have a sufficient supply of suitable wood for the making of the dreaded English long-bow, that the culture of the Yew was made the subject of a number of royal ordinances, which, of course, were allowed to drop out of observance when the bow was displaced by the firearm. And now when men plant Yews they are mostly the ornamental varieties, such as the Irish or Florence Court Yew, which originated as a wild sport on the mountains of Fermanagh about a hundred and forty years ago. Evelyn, it is true, revived the interest in the Yew as an ornamental tree, and it is with regret we add that at his suggestion it was first put to the base use called topiary work, which had hitherto been restricted to Box and Juniper. Evelyn showed how much more
closely and continuously the Yew could be clipped without affecting its vitality, and the fashion he thus set—and regarded as a "merit"—was very generally followed during the next century. Many of the atrocities of those days are still with us, but only as survivals; and we can so often agree with Evelyn that we may forgive him for having led our ancestors astray in this matter. Evelyn was by no means blind to the good points of the tree in its natural condition, as witness this quotation, which is as true to-day as when it was written:—
"He that in winter should behold some of our highest hills in Surry clad with whole woods of these two last sorts of trees [Box and Yew], for divers miles in circuit (as in those delicious groves of them, belonging to the Honourable, my Noble Friend, the late Sir Adam Brown, of Bechworth Castle), from Box Hill, might, without the least violence to his imagination, easily fancy himself transported into some new or enchanted country; for if in any spot in England,