124 ESSAYS. 
no account; and, apart from historie evidence, we can only 
form a somewhat conjectural estimate of the age of this cele- 
brated trunk, by a comparison with young trees of the same 
species, which are known to grow with extreme slowness. 
M. Berthelot, who has attempted the comparison under the 
most favorable circumstances, — having lived many years upon 
the island, — declares that the calculations which he has 
made, upon the supposition that the trunk has increased in 
size even at the rate of young Dragon-trees up to within the 
last eight hundred or one thousand years, have more than 
once confounded his imagination. We cannot but assign the 
very highest antiquity to a tree like this, which the storms 
and casualties of four centuries have scarcely changed. 
Upon the whole, we cannot resist the conclusion, that many 
trees have far survived what we are accustomed to consider 
their habitual duration ; that even in Europe, where man has 
so often and so extensively changed the face of the soil, as 
his wants or caprices have dictated, some trees, favored by 
fortune, have escaped destruction for at least one or two thou- 
sand years; while in other, and particularly in some tropical 
countries, either on account of a more favorable climate, or 
because they have been more respected, or haply more neg- 
lected, by the inhabitants, a few may with strong probability 
be traced back to twice that period; and, perhaps, almost to 
that epoch which the monuments both of history and geology 
seem to indicate as that of the last great revolution of the 
earth’s surface. After making every reasonable allowance 
for errors of observation and too sanguine inference, and 
assuming, in the more extraordinary cases, those estimates 
which give minimum results, we must still regard some of 
these trees, not only as the oldest inhabitants of the globe, 
but as more ancient than any human monument, — as exhib- 
iting a living antiquity, compared with which the mouldering 
relics of the earliest Egyptian civilization, the pyramids them- 
selves, are but structures of yesterday. 
