212 TAXODINE^ 



the clammiest among the frog-born, would wince at 

 the idea of any prolonged habitation at its base. 



We can easily imagine, for our part, that such a 

 scene would conjure up mental pictures of remote 

 ages, of Eocene days when mighty beasts — Dino- 

 saurs, Ichthyosauri, and their like — disported them- 

 selves therein, and, by their superior weight and 

 hungry ferocity, drove out on to the ridges the lesser- 

 limbed animals of the day, and among them the 

 three-toed Hipparion, the precursor of the fleet- 

 footed horse of to-day. 



And then our thoughts will revert as to which of 

 these in life's great conflict triumphed. Not the 

 mighty Dinosaur and his kind w^ould be mono- 

 polisers of a great earth's domain. They have 

 retired into space many a long year ago, their would-be 

 victims of spoliation have survived and developed 

 gradually and surely, in scecula scecidornm. And 

 is not this a lesson that can well be applied to the 

 current events of to-day — I write in 191 6 — and 

 may not good augury be deduced from it on behalf 

 of the ultimate triumph of lesser nationalities ? As 

 it was then with the lesser and greater of beasts, so 

 may it be with the greater and lesser countries of 

 to-day. May it in turn and course of time be recorded 

 of them, as it was of those old warriors of an ancient 

 animal land, in language quaint and apt, as Francis 

 Thompson wrote it, " And thy great eaters thou the 

 greatest eatest." 



It is of the lesser editions of these trees and as they 

 grow in our British Isles that we must prate. We 

 have no trees to compare in mightiness or historical 

 association with those of which we have spoken. 

 We have no trees here that soar to the 175 ft. heights 

 of those mighty Mexicans, or approach their fabulous 

 girths. We have nothing that can compare in size 

 or age — ^perhaps only one or two that top a hundred 



