Oak trees were the perfect metaphorical tool for conveying this idea because they had special status in the woodlands of Britain; they were associated with the gods of ancient civilizations and were seen as the kings of the forest, and yet every country dweller would have known from childhood that they grew from acorns small enough to fall through a hole in their pockets. In the early 1700s Lewis Duncombe (1711-1730) translated – or interpreted – the Latin tag ‘De minumus maxima’ (‘out of little [comes] great’) as ‘The lofty oak from a small acorn grows’, and in 1732 the proverb appeared in Thomas Fuller’s Gnomologia as: The greatest Oaks have been little Acorns. In 1797 the American newspaper proprietor and poet David Everett wrote a rhyming speech to be recited by a child at a school presentation in a version closer to the one we use today: Large streams from little fountains flow, Tall oaks from little acorns grow.
