34 TREES AND TREE-PLANTING. 
ground, and is at least eighteen hundred years old. An- 
other in Dorsetshire is of equal age. In Westphalia is a 
hollow oak, which was a place of refuge in the troubled 
times of medizval history. The great oak at Saintes, 
in southern France, is ninety feet in girth, and has been 
ascertained to be two thousand years old. This monu- 
ment still flourishes, or did recently, and commemorates 
a period which antedates the first campaign of Julius 
Ceesar. 
And the Lord God planted the trees of the field— 
“every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for 
food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, 
and the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” under the 
shadow of which Eve and Lucifer had that agreeable 
little intercourse from which came all this trouble and 
confusion. 
