In the " Ramble " — Fourth Excursion 



ways, and find the silent counterparts of humankind. 

 A very similar growth to the foregoing is the bladder- 

 senna (^Colutea ardorescens), also pinnate and yellow 

 flowered, but the flowers are in racemes instead of 

 umbels, and the leaf is odd-pinnate instead of even-pin- 

 nate; which is the scientific side of the matter, and 

 prosy enough, I hope, for those who have no sympathy 

 with nature's ''temperament" and "poetry." The 

 caragana fails of true arboreal dimensions as complete- 

 ly as the staghorn sumach, but it fills a small place in 

 a large way — which furnishes a good motto for all am- 

 bitious folk. 



Cedar of Lebanon. — The species of most antique in- 

 terest in the Park is the famous cedar of Lebanon, a dark, 

 stern-looking evergreen that takes our thoughts across 

 the sea and thousands of years into the past. This very 

 tree might be descended, with only two or three inter- 

 mediate generations, from one that lost its life at the 

 building of Solomon's temple, more than five hundred 

 years before Plato, Socrates, and all the art and poetry 

 of the Greeks, and shows the length as well as brevity 

 of human history. Solomon was the most famous bota- 

 nist, zoologist, and polygamist of ancient times. ''He 

 spake of trees, from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon 

 even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall ; he 

 spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, 

 and of fishes." What would not modern science give 

 for a transcript of the botanical, zoological, ornitholog- 

 ical, entomological, and ichthyological lore of that vo- 

 luptuous old wiseacre ! 



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