546 THE UNIVERSE. 



silence as to things so extraordinary as to be considered 

 fabulous; but one thing is certain, viz. that where the roots 

 are found they raise the earth into little hillocks, and if 

 the soil will not yield, the roots press against each other 

 and form lofty mounds which rise to the branches: they 

 interlace with each other so as to form complete arcades, 

 below Avhich whole squadrons can ride on horseback." 



This idea of immortality in trees is often met with in 

 the works of the ancients. The historian Josephus, in 

 his Jetvuli War, relates that in his day there Avas near the 

 city of Ebron a turpentine-tree which was as old as the 

 days of Adam (book v. chap, xxxi.) 



It Avas reserved for modern naturalists to show that 

 these assertions, however extraordinary they may appear, 

 are still rigorously correct, and that many of our trees, in 

 some sort indestructible, may have witnessed the final 

 scenes of creation, and after braving the action of so many 

 ages, are still upright and living to this day. 



It is now a hu.ndred years since Adanson, by ingenious 

 calculations, showed the learned that such ideas, though 

 extraordinary, are yet facts of the most scrupulous exacti- 

 tude. This naturalist, by a happy chance, found in the 

 interior of the trunk of a baobal) in one of the Cape Verd 

 Islands an inscription which had been traced on it by 

 the English 300 years previousl)'. Starting from this 

 point and comparing the diameters of the stems of many 

 of these bulky trees, the French savant succeeded in 

 proving that the most vigorous of these primitive in- 

 habitants of the African forests might be at least 5000 

 years old. 



A bareheaded cypress, a venerable patriarch of the vege- 

 table kingdom, has possibly traversed a still longer vista 

 of ages! It is seen at the present day on the road from 



