THE AGE OF TREES. 53 



cline of material prosperity has been followed by a sudden increase of 

 intemperance, and after a prolonged war the vanquished party seems 

 to be chiefly liable to that additional affliction. The explanation is 

 that, after the stimulant-habit has once been initiated, every unusual 

 depression of mental or physical vigor calls for an increased applica- 

 tion of the wonted method of relief. Nations who have become ad- 

 dicted to the worship of a poison-god will use his temple as a place 

 of refuge from every calamity ; and children whose petty ailments 

 have been palliated with narcotics, wine, and cordials, will afterward 

 be tempted to drown their deeper sorrow in deeper draughts of the 

 same nepenthe. 



And even those who manage to suppress that temptation have to 

 suppress the revivals of a hard-dying hydra, and will soon find that 

 only abstinence from all poisons is easier than temperance. 



> 



THE AGE OF TEEES. 



By J. A. FAEEEE. 



SINCE De Candolle, the celebrated Swiss botanist, propagated the 

 idea that a tree has no limits set by nature in its constitution to 

 the term of its existence, the question of the age attainable by trees 

 has never ceased to be debated with considerable interest. De Can- 

 dolle's argument was to the effect that whereas animals have, by the 

 physiological construction of their vessels, a set limit to the duration 

 of their lives, trees have no such natural termination ; and that al- 

 though their decay and death are so familiar to us that we commonly 

 speak of this or that species as living for a given period like two hun- 

 dred years, yet such decay is rather the result of accident or disease 

 than of any law inherent in their nature such as in our own case we 

 designate as death by old age. Whence, the same botanist inferred, 

 there is no reason why trees under perfectly favorable conditions 

 should ever perish ; and he proceeded to adduce in favor of that the- 

 ory instances of trees which even then were in the enjoyment of no 

 contemptible moment of eternity. 



Until accurate observations have been made for hundreds or per- 

 haps thousands of years, it would seem impossible to arrive at even 

 an approximate solution of so wide a problem as this. Under the 

 best conditions we could never eliminate those causes of tree mortality 

 whicn De Candolle fairly enough calls accidental, but which are con- 

 tained in the invariable laws of the elements. The largest, and there- 

 fore probably the oldest, trees are the special sport of the lightning ; 

 and the storm which has so often felled trees of the most prodigious 

 size will, even if it spare the trunk, break off boughs, thus admitting 



