472 



HISTORY OF THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM, 



centuries before the Trojan war. Some of the 

 most celebrated' erections of antiquity were 

 constructed of this tree. "Solomon raised a 

 levy of thirty thousand men out of all Israel; 

 and he sent them to Lebanon, ten thousand a 

 month, by courses; and he had threescore and 

 ten thousand that bore burthens, and fourscore 

 thousand hewers in the mountains. And he 

 covered the temple with beams and boards of 

 cedar. And he built chambers against it, which 

 rested on the house, with timber of cedar. And 

 the cedar of the house within was carved with 

 knops and flowers: all was cedar, there was 

 no stone seen." Thus vtrites the sacred historian, 

 who mentions that the same monarch had a 

 palace of cedar in the forest of Lebanon. Ancient 

 writers notice that the ships of Sesostris, the 

 Egyptian conqueror, one of them two hundred 

 and eighty cubits long, were formed of this 

 timber; as was also the gigantic statue of Diana 

 in the temple at Ephesus. Some difficulty, no 

 doubt, exists, with regard to the ancient history 

 of this celebrated tree, — there being other trees, 

 stiU named cedars, which, though somewhat 

 resembling them, do not belong to the same genus, 

 as the white cedar, which is a cypress; and the 

 red, which is a juniper. 



In addition to the durability of its timber, the 

 cedar is, in its appearance, the most majestic of 

 trees; and when it stands alone in a situation 

 worthy of it, it is hardly possible to conceive a 

 finer vegetable ornament. Its height in this coun- 

 try has seldom equalled the taller of the larches, 

 though it has nearly approached to it; but the 

 very air of the tree impresses one with the idea 

 of its comparative immortality. There is a 

 firmness in the bark and a stability in the trunk, 

 in the mode in which that lays hold of the ground, 

 and in the form of the branches and their inser- 

 tion into the trunk, not found in any other pine, 

 scarcely in any other tree. The foliage, too, is 

 superior to that of any other of the tribe, each 

 branch being perfect in its form : the points of 

 the leaves spread upwards into beautiful little 

 tufts; and the whole upper surface of the brancli, 

 which droops in a graceful curve toward the 

 extremity, having the semblance of velvet. The 

 colour is also fine; it is a rich green, wanting the 

 bluish tint of the pine and fir, and the lurid and 

 gloomy one of the cypress. 



The description of the cedar of Lebanon by 

 the prophet Ezekiel, is fine and true: — "Behold 

 the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon, with fair 

 branches, and of an high stature; and his top was 

 among the thick boughs. His boughs were mul- 

 tipUed, and his branches became long. The fir 

 trees were not like his boughs, nor the chestnut 

 trees like his branches; nor any tree in the garden 

 of God like unto him in beauty." 



Whether the cedars of Lebanon were thinned 

 to exhaustion hy the fourscore thousand axes of 



the king of Israel, or whether they have decayed 

 in consequence of some variation of climate, or 

 other physical change in the country, it is impos- 

 sible to say; but modern travellers represent that 

 very few now exist, though some are of immense 

 bulk — about thirty-six feet in circumference, 

 and quite undecayed. 



The cedar of Lebanon, though it has been 

 introduced into many parts of England as an 

 ornamental tree, and has thriven well, has not 

 yet been planted in great numbers for the sake 

 of its timber. No doubt it is more difficult to 

 rear, and requires a far richer soil than the pine 

 and the larch; but the principal objection to it 

 hasbeenthe supposed great slownessof its growth, 

 although that does not appear to be very much 

 greater than in the oak. Some cedars, which 

 have been planted in a soil well adapted to them, 

 at Lord Carnarvon's, at Highclere, have grown 

 with extraordinary rapidity. Of the cedars 

 planted in the Royal garden at Chelsea, in 1683, 

 two had, in eighty-three years, acquired a cir- 

 cumference of more than twelve feet, at two feet 

 from the ground, while their branches extended 

 over a circular space forty feet in diameter. 

 Seven and twenty years afterwards the trunk of 

 the largest one had increased more than half a 

 foot in circumference; which is probably more 

 than most oaks of a similar age would do during 

 an equal period. The surface soil in which the 

 Chelsea cedars throve so well, is not by any 

 means rich; but they seem to have been greatly 

 nourished from a neighbouring pond, upon the 

 filling up of which they wasted away. 



Various specimens of the cedar of Lebanon 

 are mentioned as having attained a very great 

 size in England. One planted by Dr Uvedale, 

 in the garden of the manor-house at Enfield, 

 about the middle of the seventeenth century, 

 had a girth of fourteen feet in 1789; eight feet 

 of the top of it had been blown down by the 

 great hurricane in 1703, but still it was forty feet 

 in height. At Whitton, in Middlesex, a remark- 

 able cedar was blown down in 1779. It had 

 attained the height of seventy feet; the branches 

 covered an area one hui»dred feet in diameter; the 

 trunk was sixteen feet in circumference at seven 

 feet from the ground, and twenty-one feet at the 

 insertion of the great branches twelve feet above 

 the surface. There were about ten principal 

 branches orlimbs,and theiraverage circumference 

 was twelve feet. About the age and planter of 

 this immense tree its historians are not agreed, 

 some of them referring its origin to the days of 

 Elizabeth, and even alleging that it was planted 

 by her own hand. Another cedar, at Hillingdon, 

 near Uxbridge, had, at the presumed age of IIG 

 years, arrived at the following dimensions: its 

 height was fifty-three feet, and the spread of the 

 branches ninety-six feet from east to west, and 

 eighty-nine from north to south. The circum- 



