150 CEDARS 



queer fantasy that imagination run riot or poetical 

 licence could picture. Whether they are as old, or 

 are the lineal descendants of trees as old as the Song 

 of Solomon, the Norman Conquest, or even whether 

 they dated back to the times of the first created 

 being in the garden of Eden — and all these sug- 

 gestions have been put forward in distinguished 

 prose and immortal verse, — the ordinary listener to 

 such stories, or readers of such references, seem 

 more disposed to regard them rather in the light of 

 picturesque fairy tales than actual prosaic and 

 established facts. 



From descriptions and pictures these trees of 

 Palestine, from whose groves Babylonian temples 

 were built, and whose beauty was sung of in verse 

 and psalm, look bigger, more battered and ancient, 

 than do our more modern productions of lesser age, 

 200 years or so. The huge forests spoken of have 

 disappeared, and all that remain of them are groves. 

 It is historically asserted that the tribes of Judah 

 and Ephraim cut them down indiscriminately, without 

 any recourse to economic replanting. Had this act of 

 vandalism been perpetrated in a modern-day world, 

 and the facts brought to the notice of some rating 

 authority, we should have suggested that these impro- 

 vident sons, and perhaps too the women-workers 

 implicated, the daughters of Judah and Ephraim, 

 should have been forced to pay annual tribute to 

 their county coffers upon a high agricultural assess- 

 ment of that land, until they had made good on 

 behalf of posterity their wanton depredations. 



The calculations of modern man put the expectancy 

 of life in a Cedar at from 500 to 800 years, yet as a 

 matter of history the oldest Cedar in England cannot 

 be much over 250 years of age. It is a tree that to 

 all outward appearances seems to attain maturity of 

 height, if not diameter, in a much shorter space of time. 



