Page:Timber and Timber Trees, Native and Foreign.djvu/237

XXVII.] THE CHESTNUT TREE (Castanea vesca).

The sweet Chestnut attains to large dimensions, and is found thinly scattered over most of our English counties. It is abundant in the southern parts of Europe, and extends eastward to the Caucasus. It is also met with in the mountainous parts of Virginia, Georgia, and Carolina, in North America.

The wood is brown in colour, of moderate hardness and weight, has a clean fine grain, and is rather porous. The medullary rays cannot be distinctly traced in it, and it has no alburnum or sap-wood. These two characteristic points serve to distinguish it from the British Oak, for which it has sometimes been mistaken. There is also this further difference between them, the Chestnut is of slower growth than the British Oak.

The Chestnut timber stood in high favour at one time, and it is even supposed that preference was given to it over Oak for employment in some of our oldest and best specimens of civil architecture, but upon careful, examination of the woods during reparations it has generally proved to be Oak of native growth that had been used, and not Chestnut.

The Chestnut is scarcely ever used now except for very common or ordinary works, such as posts, rails, palings, hop-poles, &c.; but as it is durable when kept wholly submerged, it may be used for piles, sluices, &c., with advantage.

It is on record that specimens of the sweet Chestnut have attained to a very great size and remarkable longevity; one standing lately in Sicily is said to have measured 160 feet in circumference; the centre part, however, was quite gone, and the cavity thus formed was considered to be sufficiently large to give shelter to a