124 ESSAYS. 



no account ; and, apart from historic evidence, we can only 

 form a somewhat conjectural estimate of the age of this cele- 

 brated trunk, by a comparison with young trees of the same 

 species, which are known to grow with extreme slowness. 

 M. Berthelot, who has attempted the comparison under the 

 most favorable circumstances, — having lived many years upon 

 the island, — declares that the calculations which he has 

 made, upon the supposition that the trunk has increased in 

 size even at the rate of young Dragon-trees up to within the 

 last eight hundred or one thousand years, have more than 

 once confounded his imagination. We cannot but assign the 

 very highest antiquity to a tree like this, which the storms 

 and casualties of four centuries have scarcely changed. 



Upon the whole, we cannot resist the conclusion, that many 

 trees have far survived what we are accustomed to consider 

 their habitual duration ; that even in Europe, where man has 

 so often and so extensively changed the face of the soil, as 

 his wants or caprices have dictated, some trees, favored by 

 fortune, have escaped destruction for at least one or two thou- 

 sand years ; while in other, and particularly in some tropical 

 countries, either on account of a more favorable climate, or 

 because they have been more respected, or haply more neg- 

 lected, by the inhabitants, a few may with strong probability 

 be traced back to twice that period ; and, perhaps, almost to 

 that epoch which the monuments both of history and geology 

 seem to indicate as that of the last great revolution of the 

 earth's surface. After making every reasonable allowance 

 for errors of observation and too sanguine inference, and 

 assuming, in the more extraordinary cases, those estimates 

 which give minimum results, we must still regard some of 

 these trees, not only as the oldest inhabitants of the globe, 

 but as more ancient than any human monument, — as exhib- 

 iting a living antiquity, compared with which the mouldering 

 relics of the earliest Egyptian civilization, the pyramids them- 

 selves, are but structures of yesterday. 



