144 THE HUMAN SIDE OF TREES 



there are junipers in Oregon with an estimated age 

 of six to eight thousand years. If this is true, the 

 junipers have not been receiving proper credit as 

 long livers, and the honour of sheltering the oldest 

 tree may go to the United States rather than Mex- 

 ico, after all. 



Another long-living tree race is the yew, which 

 exists from 1200 to 2800 years; the olives live from 

 700 to 2000 years; the oaks, from 600 to 1400, and 

 the walnuts from 900 to 1000 years. How insig- 

 nificant are our lives compared to these! Such 

 figures represent averages and do not take into 

 account especially hardy and well-favoured indi- 

 viduals which sometimes live to almost double their 

 "four-score years and ten." 



If we only understood the language of the trees 

 better, what a revision of history there would be! 

 There are in existence to-day different trees which 

 began their lives in all the correspondingly different 

 periods in the biography of man. If each one had 

 taken particular notice of the customs and events 

 of the time in which it was born and then was able 

 to communicate these impressions to men, the result 

 would be a contemporary living history of civilisa- 

 tion. Each tree would be an authority and, instead 

 of searching in ponderous tomes to discover whether 

 Charles II of England spoke in a deep bass or a 



