412 



NATURE 



[March 5, 1896 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



[ The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions ex- 

 pressed by his correspondents. Neither can he undertake 

 to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected 

 manuscripts intended for this or any other part of NATURE. 

 No notice is taken of anonymous communications. ] 



The Sacred Tree of Kum-Bum. 



The eighth number of the Bulletin dti Musium d'Hisfoire 

 Naturelle for 1895, which has just reached me, contains a paper 

 by M. Edouard Blanc, entitled " L'Arbre a prieres de Goum- 

 boum." This reminds me of a brief article which I contributed 

 to Nature in 1883 (vol. xxvii. pp.223, 224). 



M. Blanc begins his account by the remark : " Je veux parler 

 du fameux arbre qui croU dans un monast^re buddhiste, au nord 

 du Thibet, et qui produit des lettres, des mots, des prieres et 

 autres formulas religieuses, le plus souvent tracees sur son ecorce 

 et sur ses feuilles." Of the actual fact he adds, " des voyageurs 

 europeens, M. Potanine et M. Grenard entre autres, ont apporte 

 le temoignage de leur observation directe." 



It is evident, then, that the tree still exists much as Hue and 

 <iabet described it. And M. Blanc brought back with him to 

 Europe a branch and a portion of the trunk. He says : '* Le 

 phenomene est veritable : il existe reellement, et j'ai vu des 

 caracteres thibetains tres nettement traces sur les branches de 

 I'arbre en question." 



M. Blanc discusses the cause. He dismisses the probability 

 of their being either natural markings or the work of insects 

 accidentally resembling alphabetic characters. He has no doubt 

 that they are produced artificially, probably with the aid of 

 heat. 



In 1891 Mr. William Woodville Rockhill's book, " The Land 

 of the Lamas," appeared ; in it (pp. 67, 68) he gives the follow- 

 ing account of the tree : — 



"Although I did not see the convent treasure-house and the 

 ' white sandal-wood tree ' until later, I will describe them here. 

 In a small yard enclosed within high walls stand three trees 

 about twenty-five to thirty feet high, a low wall keeping the soil 

 about their roots. These are the famous trees of Kum-Bum, or 

 rather tree, for to the central one only is great reverence shown, 

 as on its leaves appear outline images of Tsong-k'apa. The 

 trees are probably, as conjectured by Kreitner, ^ lilacs (Phila- 

 delphus coronarius) ; the present ones are a second growth, the 

 old stumps being still visible. There were unfortunately no 

 leaves on the tree when I saw it ; and on the bark, which in 

 many places was curled up like birch or cherry bark, I could 

 distinguish no impress of any sort, although Hue says that 

 images (of Tibetan letters, not images of the god) were visible 

 on it. The lamas sell the leaves, but those I bought were so 

 much broken that nothing could be seen on them. I have it, 

 however, from Mohammedans that on the green leaf these out- 

 line images are clearly discernible. It is noteworthy that 

 whereas Hue found letters of the Tibetan alphabet on the leaves 

 of this famous tree, there are now seen only images of Tsong- 

 k'apa (or the Buddha ?). It would be interesting to learn the 

 cause of this change." - 



I was anxious to see what could be ascertained from the leaves 

 brought back by Mr. Rockhill. An application to my friend 

 Prof. Sargent, at Harvard, procured me the following interesting 

 letter : 



\<)\A, N Street, December 21, 1893. 

 My dear Sargent, — As regards the famous Kum-Bum tree, 

 I was not permitted, in any of my visits to it, to touch the tree, 

 but I got a lot of leaves fallen from it, some of which I gave to 

 the British Museum (Department of Ethnology), where Franks or 

 Read would, I doubt not, be pleased to show them to Dyer. 

 From what the people at Kum-Bum told me, especially in view 



1 Kreitner, " Im Fernen Osten," p. 708. I was told that in spring these 

 trees have large clusters of violet flowers, but if they are lilacs I am 

 astonished that the Chinese do not speak of them as such, for that shrub is 

 well known in Kan-su and throughout Northern China (see Prjevalsky. 

 " Mongolia," ii. 7p). Tibetans call all sweet-smelling wood tsandan {i.e. 

 sandal-wood). .Sir Joseph Hooker (Himalayan Joicmals, i. 298) says 

 -that the Lepshahs and Bhoteas call the funereal cypress tsandan. The 

 Kum-Bum tsandan karpo is certainly not a cypress, however. 



■■! When Lieutenant Kreitner visited this place (1879), the images on the 

 leaves were as at the present time. See " Im l&'ernen Osten," p. 707. The 

 Arab traveller, Ibn Batuta, saw in the fourteenth century, at Deh Fattan, 

 on the Malabar coast, in the courtyard of a mosque, a tree called the " tree 

 of testimony." _ Every year there was a leaf on it, on which was written " by 

 the pen of divine power," the formula, " There is no God but God ; and 

 Mohammed is the envoy of God." The inhabitants used it to cure disease 

 •(see Ibn Batutah, Defrimery's Transl., iv. 85). 



of their reference to the big bunches of violet flowers, I thought 

 the tree might prove to be a lilac. 



The bark turns up on the trunk like that of a birch. Kreitner 

 is responsible for the identification of this " white sandal-wood " 

 with the Philadelphus coronarius. 



The roots from which the trees I saw were growing look very 

 old, how old I cannot say, being ignorant in all such matters, 

 the live stems are certainly not over 15 to 20 feet in height, and 

 4 to 6 inches diameter at the root, and some of them look very 

 healthy. It may be that when Hue and Gabet visited this place 

 (in 1842, I believe), the original trunk was yet alive. 



They say that " three men could not stretch around the 

 trunk," but he adds that it was not over 8 feet high. He must 

 refer to an old dead trunk, out of which shoots were growing. 

 If this is not the case, we cannot have seen the same tree ; that 

 is all there is about it. 



As to the " odeur exquise et qui approche un peu de celle de 

 la cannelle," this must be hearsay, and refers to the popular 

 belief that the tree is a sandal-wood, or else is a native simile 

 for the odour of lilacs. 



The large red flowers Hue also refers to may be violet ones. 

 Mongol is not so precise a language, in fact certain colours which 

 which we would call violet are invariably called red by them. 



Hue mentions the curling up of the bark. 



On the whole, I am inclined to think that here as throughout 

 his book. Hue's reminiscences of facts and hearsay have misled 

 him. He certainly could not see the image on the leaves or 

 bark, for even the Kum-Bum lamas, to whom I mentioned my 

 inability to detect anything on the leaves they had given me, 

 assured me \}na.\. faith was necessary — " as one's faith is so is the 

 clearness of the image on the leaf." 



I hope the leaves will assist in throwing some light on the 

 question. Ever sincerely yours, 



(Signed) W. W. Rockhill, 



Sir Augustus Franks kindly sent me some of the leaves, 

 accompanied with the following memorandum : — 



" Leaves from the tsandan karpo (' white sandal-wood tree') 

 of Kumbum, said to have sprung up on the spot where Toong- 

 kape's mother threw his hair when, having shaved his head, 

 she consecrated him to the house. 



" Used when ground as medicine — also carried in charm . 

 boxes. 



" Collected by W. W. Rockhill at Kiimbiim in 1891." 



They were carefully examined by Mr. W. B. Hemsley, F.R.S., 

 Principal Assistant in the Kew Herbarium, who has long been 

 engaged on a critical study of the Chinese Flora. He arrived at 

 the conclusion that they belonged to Syringa villosa, a Chinese 

 species. He published his determination mjourn. Linn. Soc. 

 (vol. XXX. p. 133), and I am disposed to regard it as correct. 

 It confirms the statement of Kreitner (Nature, xxvii. p. 171). 



Rockhill's identification with Philadelphus is a mistake easy 

 of explanation. He has confused the popular and the scientific 

 use of the name Syringa. Lilac is botanically Syringa ; Syringa 

 is botanically Philadelphus. 



It will be seen from the accounts given above that the 

 phenomenon is not consistent with itself at different times. 

 This confirms the opinion of M. Blanc that it is an elaborate 

 fraud. W. T. Thiselton-Dyer. 



P.S. — I have omitted to add that Blanc says (,l.c. p. 323) : 

 " L'arbre parait appartenir a la famille des Phytolaccacees ou 

 a une famille analogue." — W. T. T. D. 



NO. T375, VOL. 53] 



The Rontgen Rays. 



Referring to two letters in your last issue, p. 388, it is 

 somewhat disconcerting to have Prof. Rontgen's original experi- 

 ment — viz. the observation of shadows thrown on a barium- 

 platino-cyanide screen — treated as a novelty. No one at all 

 informed can have had the least scepticism concerning the prob- 

 able observation of such shadows by Prof Salvioni, though the 

 sensational announcement made by some daily papers, that the 

 eye had been made " actually to see " objects inside enclosures, 

 was received, and is still received, with complete incredulity. 

 A protected barium-platino-cyanide screen is extremely useful as 

 a tester of the condition of an exhausted tube, and I have 

 constantly used it as such, in imitation of Prof. Rontgen. 



That a Crookes' tube gets hot when in action is perfectly 

 patent to the touch ; so also is the electrostatic attraction of the 

 tube for pieces of paper and the like. 



