CHAPTER I 



INTRODUCTORY: THE LONGEVITY OF TREES, ETC. 



' Believe me who have tried. Thou wilt find something more in 

 woods than in books. Trees and rocks will teach what thou canst 

 not hear from a master.' St Bernard. 



The recent publication in the daily press of 

 instances of human longevity under the heading 

 ^ Links with the Past' prompted a comparison between 

 the length of time represented by the duration of a 

 tree and the lifetime of a human being. The com- 

 parison of single lives suggested the further step of 

 contrasting the antiquity of the oldest family-histories 

 with the remoteness of the period to which it is 

 possible to trace the ancestry of existing members of 

 the plant kingdom. 



My primary object in these pages is not to deal with 

 familiar cases of longevity in trees, but to consider 

 in the first place some of the problems connected with 

 the origin of the present British flora, and then to 

 describe a few examples of diflerent types of plants 



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