202 INSTANCES OF AGE. [BOOK i. 



to be 22-5 lines deep; consequently, he would arrive, by 

 calculation, at the conclusion, that, as his plant was one year 

 growing 0-225 of a line, it would be a hundred years in 

 growing 2 2' 5 lines, while, in fact, it has been only forty 

 years. And so of the rest. 



When we hear of the Baobab trees of Senegal being 5150 

 years old, as computed by Adanson, and the Taxodium 

 distichum still more aged, according to the ingenious calcu- 

 lations of Alphonse De Candolle, it is impossible to avoid 

 suspecting that some such error as that just explained has 

 led to such excessive calculations. 



There is, however, no doubt that Exogenous trees acquire 

 an age which may seem incredible to those who do not recol- 

 lect how much their peculiar way of life favours an incessant 

 and indefinite renewal of vegetative force for periods of 

 unknown duration. We have, in fact, good historical proof 

 of at least the following cases : 



In the garden of the late Sir Robert Vaughan, at Nannan, 

 in Merionethshire, there once existed a gigantic Oak, 

 which was said by tradition to have been the very tree in 

 which Owen Glendwr confined the Welch Chieftain, Howel 

 Sale, taken prisoner by him in the time of Henry IV. 

 Let us suppose this tree, which was of course hollow, to 

 have been only three feet in diameter in 1410 (and it could 

 not have been less, and was probably much more), and let 

 us take the annual growth of old Oak trees to be one inch 

 of semi-diameter in twenty years ; it must in that case have 

 been 360 years old in 1410 to this add 403, the number of 

 years that intervened between 1410 and 1813, when it was 

 blown down, and we shall obtain a total age of 763 years. 

 It was, no doubt, much older.* 



* There is an apocryphal story of an oak tree having been felled in the Ardennes, 

 within whose trunk were found coins struck 276 years before the foundation 

 of Rome. That tree was, therefore, estimated to have been 3600 years old. 



