490 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



ished seats, and the dryads growing with the leafy pines and the oaks, and 

 uttering cries of pain as the woodman's ax touched the tree. The oak grove 

 at Dodona constituted the most ancient oracle of the world, while a plane tree 

 spoken of by Homer was said by Pausauius to be au object of worship. It is 

 recorded of Xerxes that in his march to Sardis he becames enamored of a 

 sacred plane tree and adorned it with ornaments of gold and left a guard- 

 ian to protect it, and that he lingered so long in the worship that he lost the 

 battle that followed. The oak under which Abraham is said to have enter- 

 tained the angels at Mamre became an object of extreme veneration to his 

 descendants and was worshiped down to the time of Constantine. Both in 

 Africa and Guiana there is a reverence for the silk-cotton tree, the natives 

 fearing to cut it down lest death should speedily follow. In the New Zealand 

 mythology Rata is rebuked and put to shame by the spirits of the forest for 

 cutting down a tall tree divinity for his canoe. The Saxon word wood-mare, 

 for au echo, is a relic of the days when Englishmen believed, as many bar- 

 barians do still, that the answering echo of the voice from the wood is an 

 answering spirit. 



Thus we see that these superstitions have prevailed over the entire world. 

 In Europe especially they had a very firm hold. Canute passed laws pro- 

 hibiting such worship, and Boniface, the apostle to the Germans, outraged 

 the pious regard of the Saxons for a mighty oak by cutting it down in spite 

 of their remonstrances. Many of the Christian priests were more politic, 

 however, and allowed the pagan superstitions to entwine themselves about 

 the Christian faith in various ways. 



In Earopeau folk lore, which is undoubtedly a continuance of the older 

 superstitious notions, the trees which occupy the most prominent place are 

 the elder, the thorn and the rowan-tree or mountain ash. In Denmark a 

 twig of the elder placed silently in the ground is a cure for toothache, whilst 

 no furniture, least of all a cradle, can be made of its wood. The tree is pro- 

 tected by the elder-mother, without whose consent not a leaf may be touched, 

 and who, it is believed, would strangle the babe as it lay asleep in its cradle. 

 About Chemnitz elder boughs are fastened before the cattle stalls to keep 

 witchcraft from the cattle, and wreaths of it hung up in houses on Good 

 Friday after sunset are believed to confer immunity from caterpillars. The 

 legend that the cross was made of its wood is evidently an after-growth of 

 which we have so many examples, to give a Christian color to a heathen 

 practice, for the elder was the tree which in heathen times was said to shelter 

 the Prussian earth-god. 



Like the elder, the white thorn was held an object of worship and was said 

 to be scathless in thunder storms. In Switzerland and the eastern counties 

 of England its flowers brought into the house are said to produce death. 

 This is doubtless also a relic of the time when the tree was considered too 

 sacred to be touched. The veneration for it was too deeply rooted in the 

 minds of the people to be expunged and the church in time wound its own 

 legend about it, and, by the fiction that our Savior was crowned with its thorns, 

 deprived the worship of the tree of its heathen sting. The flowers are 

 regarded as the emblem of hope, and were carried in the wedding processions, 

 by the girls in ancient Greece, and laid upon the altar of Ilymen, which was 

 lighted by torches made of the hawthorn wooJ. The French have a legend 

 that an old tiiorn in the churchyard of St. Innocent of Paris came into 

 blossom a second time, on the day after the massacre of St. Bartholomew. 



