impossible to avoid them entirely in work of this character. I am greatly indebted to Sir William Dyer, who was good enough to read all the proofs after the first volume, and to suggest many little corrections which his exceptional knowledge of literature, persons and places detected as desirable. Another gentleman who was previously unknown to me, Mr. Palmer, was also extremely helpful in correcting my proofs, and detected the misplacement of a letter, a comma or a hyphen, in a manner which the sharpest-sighted press reader would envy.
The pleasantest part of my own work was hunting up, and personally visiting, every tree which had been recorded in print of exceptional size, interest or rarity; for I found it unsafe to accept any identifications or measurements without verifying them, and, though I was greatly assisted by others in the discovery of trees worthy of record in a few counties, I found that the remarkable trees of England generally had been most insufficiently and often inaccurately described. Though there is hardly a county in England in which I could not find an ornithologist or an entomologist who knew his own district like his pocket, and could guide a stranger to see anything of interest in his own line of study, I found whole groups of counties where the trees had never been examined by anyone, not even by the local botanists to whom one would have thought they would specially appeal. Worcestershire, Norfolk and Perthshire are perhaps the only counties which had been well investigated, and though I travelled many thousands of miles by rail, and wore out two motor¬ cars, in visiting over six hundred places in Great Britain in order to describe, measure and photograph the most interesting trees which I could hear of, I have probably overlooked m the suburban counties, and perhaps in Wales and the North of England, a few which ought to have been mentioned. I must say that during the ten years which were occupied in this delightful work I received a large amount of help and guidance from the owners, agents and foresters alike, and formed many acquaintances and some friendships with men I should otherwise never have met. With one single exception I was well received everywhere, though in a great majority of cases I was able to get little information from those on the spot as to the age and history of rare and important trees.
In many places properties had changed owners; in others no records had been kept of the dates of planting. Many of the trees recorded by Strutt, Loudon and others had died or disappeared, and in other cases the previously published measurements were grossly exaggerated or incorrect, and this applies specially to a publication by the Highland Society in i860 on the rare and remarkable trees of Scotland.
Anyone who examines carefully the photographs which I have pub¬ lished of selected frees will be struck by two facts. One is that the finest individual specimens are not to be found as one would expect in a few places, where the soil and climate is especially favourable to their develop¬ ment, and where past and present owners have planted with exceptional care and knowledge, but are scattered over almost the whole of Great Britain and Ireland. This is especially true of some of the deciduous trees of the United States, which were much more general in former times
