Worcester.
Beech-trees struck by Lightning (Vol. vi., p. 129.).—On Thinnigrove Common, near Nettlebed, Oxon, a beech-tree, one of three or four growing round a pit, was shattered by lightning about thirteen or fourteen years ago. A gentleman who has lived sixty years in the neighbourhood of the beech woods near Henly, tells me that he remembers three or four similar cases. Single beech-trees, which are very ornamental, generally grow very low and wide-spreading, which may be the reason why they often escape. On the other hand, in the woods where they run up close and very high, they present so many points of attraction to the electric fluid, that probably for that cause it is not often the case that one tree in particular is struck.
Corylus.
Portsmouth.
Passage in Tennyson (Vol. vi., p. 272.).—It appears to me that Tennyson has fallen into the error of a Latin construction. I call it an error, because in that language the varied terminations of the cases and numbers make that plain which we have no means of evidencing in English. I should translate it "Numenii strepitus volantis"—"The call of the curlew dreary (drearily) gleams about the moorland, as he flies o'er Locksley Hall." The summer note of the curlew is a shrill clear whistle, but in winter they sometimes indulge in a wild melancholy scream.
Corylus.
Portsmouth.
Inscriptions in Churches (Vol. vi., p. 510.).—I differ from your reply to Norwood's Query, in which you refer to the colloquy between Queen Elizabeth and Dean Nowell as the origin of these inscriptions. No doubt they were derived from the custom of our ante-Reformation ancestors, of painting figures and legends of saints upon the walls of churches; but the following instance will suffice to prove that they originated in the reign of Edward VI., and not in Queen Elizabeth's.
In the interesting paper by the Rev. E. Venables in the Transactions of the Cambridge Camden Society, on "The Church of St. Mary the Great, Cambridge," he gives, under the year
1550, the following extracts from the churchwardens' accounts: