512 THE UNIVERSE. 



jestic grandeur of the oak in this forest," he says, " sur- 

 passes all imaginable belief: this tree has never been 

 touched with the axe ; it is contemporary with the creation 

 of the world, and appears to be the symbol of immortality ! " 



Pliny does not restrict himself to this splendid image ; he 

 adds further details. " I wish," he says, " to preserve silence 

 as to things so extraordinary as to be considered fabulous ; 

 but one thing is certain, namely, that where the roots are 

 found they raise the earth into little hillocks, and if the soil 

 will not yield the roots press against each other and form 

 lofty mounds which rise to the branches : they interlace 

 with each other so as to form complete arcades, below 

 which whole squadrons can ride on horseback." 



This idea of immortality in trees is often met with in the 

 works of the ancients. The historian Josephus, in his 

 " Wars of the Jews," relates that in his day there was near 

 the city of Hebron a turpentine-tree which had " continued 

 since the creation of the world " (book iv. chap. ix.). 



It was reserved for modern naturalists to show that these 

 assertions, however extraordinary they may appear, are 

 still rigorously correct, and that many of our trees, in some 

 sort indestructible, may have witnessed the final scenes of 

 creation, and, after braving the action of so many ages, are 

 still upright and living to this day. 



It is now a hundred years since Adanson, by ingenious 

 calculations, showed the learned that such ideas, though ex- 

 traordinary, are yet facts of the most scrupulous exactitude. 

 This naturalist, by a happy chance, found in the interior of 

 the trunk of a baobab in one of the Cape Yerd Islands an 

 inscription which had been traced on it by the English 300 



