THE PINE. 27 



So true is it over again that man, with all bis ingenuities and 

 discoveries, when he opens his eyes and walks into the archives of 

 nature, invariably finds that he is only a copyist, an unintentional 

 and unconscious one, it may be, but still only a copyist. Nature 

 is beforehand with him in all his devices and designs. 



Even food is supplied by conifers, namely, in the seeds contained 

 in their cones, which are often of great size, and full of nutritious 

 matter. This is the case with those of the stone-pine, which are com- 

 monly eaten in Italy. The Swiss and Siberian pines, and mo,ny others, 

 also yield eatable seeds. Wood, as supplied by the couifevs, has 

 its most celebrated representative in that of the cedar-tree. But 

 the true cedar, native of the mountains of Lebanon, must not be 

 confounded with the red cedar used for lead pencils. The latter 

 is the produce of an entirely different tree, and is brought from 

 the West Indies. Lebanon cedar is pale and yellowish; and although 

 it exhales an agreeable odour, the scent is by no means so strong 

 as that of the pencil-cedar. There is an impression with some people 

 that the Ark was built of cedar-wood, since the consonants in the name 

 gopher bear some resemblance. But this is the boldest hypothesis. 

 Probably no one will ever know what wood was really intended by 

 "gopher." The discovery seems past finding out. The cedars of 

 Lebanon, it may be added, are not, as has often been thought, nearly 

 extinct. There is a pathetic account, in certain books, of only 28 being 

 found in the middle of the 16th century; only 22 a hundred years later; 

 in 1737, only 15; in 1810, only 12; and in 1818, only seven! The 

 writer admits, however, that there were always "plenty of young ones," 

 the above figures referring only to the patriarchs ; and now it appears, 

 from recent explorations, that the tree is still plentiful, though not 

 exactly upon Lebanon. 



There is something very grand, again, in the contemplation of the 

 great age attained by conifers, the ordinary minimum being two or 

 three centuries. That is to say, two or three centuries constitute their 

 potential lease of life, which they will exhaust, if not prematurely 

 destroyed either by accident or for the purposes of human enterprise 

 and need. Many kinds live to be seven or eight hundred years old, 

 and the colossal Wellingtonias of California are certainly as much as 

 2,000, 3,000, and even 4,000 years old ! In the Crystal Palace at 

 Sydenhatn, stands the bark of the lower portion of the trunk of one of 

 these vegetable Anakim, for they are giants as well as primaevals, and 

 no one who glances at it can doubt for a moment that the tree must 



