TREES IN MYTH AND LEGEND. 1 97 



admiration for trees, but what factor or factors was it which 

 led or do lead men to regard trees as holy and to worship 

 them? In tree-worship we have got something more present, 

 and it is that something which constitutes the fundamental 

 difference between lovers and admirers of trees and worshippers 

 of trees. 



In the first place, the worshipper of trees regards the tree as 

 being a conscious personal being. The step from loving and 

 admiring trees to worshipping trees is a retrograde though easy 

 one, and tree-worship is only to be found among plain and 

 simple peasants savouring still of antiquity and among the 

 Ancients. Science and knowledge have made us lose the con- 

 ception which some primitive people hold, and the Ancients 

 had, that trees were conscious personal beings. We have lost 

 the animistic theory of nature held by primitive man, which 

 arose through his having reached a stage of thought in which 

 having discovered some animating principle in himself, he 

 endowed all other living creatures and also inanimate things 

 with this, and ascribed to them a personality equal to his own. 



The second factor which may have contributed to tree-worship 

 was the size attained by many trees. Size in anything will 

 always impress the mind of man, and more especially primitive 

 man. We are cognisant of the effect which a sylvan giant has 

 on civilised man : how much more then would it affect a being 

 whose mind is so open to external impressions and whose 

 imagination is so vivid ? 



Thirdly, add to the grandeur of individual trees their quality 

 of longevity, and the idea of immortality associated with trees, 

 a god-like attribute, any organism possessing which was a fit 

 subject for veneration. The idea of the immortality of trees 

 was expressed by A. P. de Condolle in the beginning of the nine- 

 teenth century. He stated that trees do not die of senile decay, 

 but only as the result of injury or disease. Trees, he affirms, 

 are constructed on a plan fundamentally different from that 

 underlying the structure of the complex human organism, and 

 are endowed with a sort of potential immortality. At any rate, 

 apart from any scientific explanation as to whether trees are 

 immortal or not, we have evidence of trees living to an immense 

 age. There is exhibited in the Natural History Department of 

 the British Museum a section of a trunk of one of the mammoth 

 trees of California {Sequoia gigantea), showing on its polished 



