1§0 ; CEDARS 
queer fantasy that imagination run riot or poetical 
licence could picture. ‘Whether they are as old, or 
are the lineal descendants of trees as old as the Song 
of Solomon, the Norman Conquest, or even whether 
they: dated back to the times of the first. created: 
being inthe garden of Eden—and all these sug- 
gestions have been put. forward in distinguished 
prose and. immortal verse,—the ordinary listener to 
such stories, or readers of such references, seem 
more disposed to regard them rather in the light of 
picturesque fairy tales than actual prosaic and 
established facts. 
_ From descriptions and pictures these trees of 
Palestine, from whose groves Babylonian temples 
were built, and whose beauty was sung of in verse 
and psalm, look bigger, more battered and ancient, 
than do our more modern productions of lesser age, 
200 years or so. The huge forests spoken of have 
disappeared, and all that remain of them are groves. 
It is historically asserted that the tribes of Judah 
and Ephraim cut them down indiscriminately, without 
any recourse to economic replanting. Had this act of 
vandalism been perpetrated in a modern-day world, 
and the facts brought to the notice of some rating 
authority, we should have suggested that these impro- 
vident sons, and perhaps too the women-workers 
implicated, the daughters of Judah and Ephraim, 
should have been forced to pay annual tribute to 
their county coffers upon a high agricultural assess- 
ment of that land, until they had made good -on 
behalf of posterity their wanton depredations.. 
The calculations of modern man put the-expectancy 
of life in a Cedar at from 500 to 800 years, yet as a 
matter of history the oldest Cedar in England cannot 
be much over 250 years of age. Itis a tree that to 
all outward appearances seems to attain maturity of 
height, if not diameter, in a much shorter space of time, 
