ate TAXODINEA 
the clammiest among the frog-born, would wince at 
the idea of any prolonged habitation at its base. 
We can easily imagine, for our part, that such a 
scene would conjure up mental pictures of remote 
ages, of Eocene days when mighty beasts—Dino- 
saurs, Ichthyosauri, and their like—disported them- 
selves therein, and, by their superior weight and 
hungry ferocity, drove out on to the ridges the lesser- 
limbed animals of the day, and among them the 
three-toed Hipparion, the precursor of the fleet- 
footed horse of to-day. 
And then our thoughts will revert as to which of 
these in life’s great conflict triumphed. Not the 
mighty Dinosaur and his kind would be mono- 
polisers of a great earth’s domain. They have 
retired into space many a long year ago, their would-be 
victims of spoliation have survived and developed 
gradually and surely, im s@cula seculorum. And 
is not this a lesson that can well be applied to the 
current events of to-day—I write in 1916—and 
may not good augury be deduced from it on behalf 
of the ultimate triumph of lesser nationalities? As 
it was then with the lesser and greater of beasts, so 
may it be with the greater and lesser countries of 
to-day. May it in turn and course of time be recorded 
of them, as it was of those old warriors of an ancient 
animal land, in language quaint and apt, as Francis 
Thompson wrote it, ‘‘ And thy great eaters thou the 
greatest eatest.” 
It is of the lesser editions of these trees and as they 
grow in our British Isles that we must prate. We 
have no trees to compare in mightiness or historical 
association with those of which we have spoken. 
We have no trees here that soar to the 175 ft. heights 
of those mighty Mexicans, or approach their fabulous 
girths. We have nothing that can compare in size 
or age—perhaps only one or two that top a hundred 
