—In "the Forest," two or three miles from Bishop Stortford, is the ruin of an old oak, from which the parish no doubt takes its name of Hatfield Broad Oak. There is a print of this tree in Arthur Young's Survey of Essex.
If the rural readers of "N. & Q." will observe whether the finest specimens of oaks have their acorns growing, on long or short stalks (quercus sessiliflora or pedunculata), they might throw much light on the questions, Have we two distinct English oaks? and, if so, Which makes the largest and best timber? The timber used inside old buildings, and erroneously often called chesnut, is supposed to be the sessiliflora variety of oak, placed inside because it is not so durable as the quercus pedunculata. But I have been lately informed this variety is in Sussex selected, as the best, for Portsmouth Dockyard!
In the year 1783 my grandfather first drew attention to the two varieties of English oaks, in the Gentleman's Magazine, p. 653. He was brother of Gilbert White of Selborne, and an equally acute observer of Nature. Loudon, in his Arboretum, has collected much information, but has left the question pretty much where it was seventy years since. Surely it is time we knew precisely what is the tree of which our wooden walls are made.
A. HOLT WHITE.
Brighton.
Frozen Sounds and Sir John Mandeville (Vol. iii., pp. 25. 71.).
—Your correspondent M. A. LOWER says with truth, that the passage about frozen voices was not to be found in the knight's published work; but neither he nor any other of your contributors seems to have found the original of it. In the Tatler, No. 254., the illustrious Isaac Bickerstaff informs us that some manuscripts of Mandeville's and of Ferdinand Mendis Pinto's, not hitherto included in their published works, had come into his hands, from which he purposed making extracts from time to time; and then proceeds to give us the identical story which your correspondent J. M. G. appears to have taken for a real bit of Mandeville, in ignorance or forgetfulness of its origin: for I cannot suppose any one so dull as to take the passage in the Tatler in sober earnest. Steele no doubt took the story from Rabelais or Plutarch, and fathered it upon one whose name (much better known than his works) had become proverbial as that of a liar.
J. S. WARDEN.
Balica.