102 

 THE CEDAR TREE. 



BY THE REV. H. W. PHILLOTT, M.A. 

 In making a few remarks on the cedar tree of Lebanon, I must warn my 

 friends of the Woolhope Club that I do so almost entirely from the antifjuarian and 

 historical point of view, and not from the botanical. I am no botanist in any 

 better sense than a school -boy may be said to be a scholar, and on this groimd I hope 

 that any mistakes which I may make will be duly and distinctly jiointed out, but 

 withal treated with that indulgence which those better informed than myself can 

 so well afford to bestow. I need hardly do more than remind my audience that the 

 noble tree on which I am undertaking unworthily to discourse belongs to the great 

 family of the conifers, that within that great family it is a distinguished member 

 of the genus abies, and that within its own section of that genus it ht)lds a patent 

 of nobility with which not many members of it can venture to compete. Of some 

 of those members, and also of some closely allied to it, I shall have occasion to 

 speak by-and-bye, but first let me clear the way a little by eliminating from our 

 view three or four of them which, though often called by the name of cedar, are by 

 no means to be compared with the Cedar of Lebanon. I mean the Cedrus Virgin- 

 iana, the Cedrus Bermudiana, and the Cedrus Lycia or Phoenicia. Of these the 

 Cedrus Virginiana is often confounded with that of Bermuda, which is the only 

 reason for which I mention it. The Cedrus Bermudiana produces the wood 

 commonly called cedar, so pleasing in colour, so fragrant in scent, with which we 

 are all familiar, both for the use to which it is sometimes applied of lining drawers 

 in wardrobes, a purpose for which its fragrance and presumed antiseptic qualities 

 adapt it so well, and still more for the more common application of it in clothing 

 those sticks of plumbago which, with their wooden coverings, we call black-lead 

 pencils. The Cedrus Lycia or Phcenicia, which I have placed together, though 

 they are by no means identical, probably produces, one or other of them, the wood 

 called in two leading passages of Scripture cedar-wood, and which being expressed 

 by the same Hebrew word as the Cedar of Lebanon, has no doubt been sometimes 

 mistaken for it, especially in less critical days than our own. But in truth neither 

 of these four last-mentioned trees belongs to the same genus as the Cedar of Leba- 

 non ; they are all of them members of that of Junipers, and when we reflect that 

 the Cedar of Lebanon is not a native of Palestine properly so called, still less of 

 the desert of Arabia, in which the use of the " cedar- wood " was originally pre- 

 scribed, we shall dismiss with ease any idea of community between the two trees, 

 each bearing the name of cedar. We come, then, to the main subject of our con- 

 sideration—the Cedar of Lebanon. I need hardly enlarge on the interest with 

 which we all regard the noble tree which we know by this name, partly on account 

 of its majestic form, its solemn and impressive outlines, its brilliant lights and 

 sombre shadows, but also in no small degree on account of the venerable and 

 poetical, nay, almost sacred, character which surrounds it in connection with the 

 frequent mention of it in Holy Scripture. Talk of the Cedar of Lebanon, and the 

 minds of many, perhaps most of us, will at once revert to the Jewish Temple and 

 its great architect, the mighty and mysterious king, so universal in his genius, so 



