In 1800 M. De Candolle bad cut down, in the forest of Fontain-bleau, a trunk of a Juniper (Juniperus communis), which was found to present, near its centre, a layer which had been affected by frost, covered over by ninety-one woody layers, and which dated, therefore, from the severe winter of 1709.

An inscription written upon the trunk of a tree, and which penetrates to the alburnum, is covered over by the new woody layers, and may be found entire as long as that part of the trunk remains so. It was thus that Reisel found, in 1675, some capital letters in the middle of a beech; that Mayer, in 1688, found in the woody body of a beech a kind of sculpture representing a gallows, and a person hanging; that Albrechti, in 1687, found in the same tree the letter H, surmounted by a cross; that Adamni found, under nineteen layers of the alburnum, the letters J. C. H. M. It is thus that in certain trees in India there have been found inscriptions in the Portuguese language, which had been written there some centuries before, when the country was discovered by those navigators. It is thus that different spots, or regular stars, have been artificially formed in the middle of several trees. Two Memoires by Fougerouz de Bondaroy, inserted among those of the Academie de Paris for 1777, may be particularly consulted upon this subject.