LONGEVITY OF TREES. 9 



ivy ; it is these that are so lovely in their youth, 

 so venerable in their old age ; these that stand still 

 in quiet dignity while we talk of four-score as a 

 wonderful life-time, and for their own part, watch 

 the rise and fall even of nations. For the nature 

 of an exogenous tree being to expand and enlarge 

 externally, there is of course no physical limit to 

 the diameter it may attain, or to the number and 

 massiveness of its boughs and branches, or to the 

 multiplication of its twigs and leaves ; and should 

 the lease of life allowed it in the Divine economy 

 be considerable, as happens with certain kinds of 

 mimosa, and with many trees of the pine and cedar 

 kind, it may go on growing and enlarging for ages, 

 and after a thousand years be still in the full vigour 

 of its existence. Hence it is that the scriptural 

 image acquires such force " As the days of a tree 

 are the days of my people." Hundreds of trees are 

 standing at this moment in America, some in Cali- 

 fornia, others in Brazil, that were alive when those 

 words were written, and with a grasp upon life and 

 the earth which seems to assure them a period of 

 which they have perhaps no more than passed the me- 

 ridian. England possesses multitudes of endogenous 

 plants, though no endogenous trees. Lilies, grasses, 

 rushes, are all structurally of the same nature as the 

 palm-trees, and now and then they give us a proto- 

 type of the palm ; but the beau ideal of the endogen, 

 as said before, belongs to the equinoctial regions. 



