CEDRUS LIBANI 
20 
always finds one or two more or less. It is true that they are a little difficult to count, because they lie in 
two small valleys, and on a little mound of earth. Nevertheless, we counted them several times, and always 
found twenty-two, and one newly fallen, which had been burned towards the foot by the shepherds, who 
often bring their flocks there.” * * * § ** 
M. Eugene Roger, a Roman Catholic missionary, both counted and measured the Cedars about 1636. 
“In the midst of this plain are the Cedars of which Holy Scripture makes mention, which are in number 
twenty-two standing, which they say to have been since the creation of the world, and that God transplanted 
them, as says the Prophet, £ Cedrus Libani quas plantavit Dominus; ’ and if it be objected that the Deluge, 
having inundated the whole earth, could not have spared this place, since it even destroyed the earthly 
Paradise, and caused all plants to die, even the Tree of Life, it is true; but the Cedar being endowed by 
God with a gummy quality, this gum being very pure and bitter, conserves the wood without suffering 
putrefaction, which preserved them in that universal inundation. . . . Besides these twenty-two Cedars, which 
are standing, there are also two of the same antiquity, which are on the ground, without leaves or fruit, but 
still without corruption, although it has been more than a hundred years since they were laid low by the 
Arabs. ... It is these twenty-four Cedars which are called the Holy Cedars, at the feet of five of which 
the Maronites have raised altars. . . . There is also a forest of Cedars three leagues from this, near Thadet 
[probably the one at El Hadith], which is where the King Solomon caused them to be cut for the 
construction of the Temple of Jerusalem. In like manner, around the twenty-four sainted Cedars there 
is like a little shrubbery of young Cedars, which proceed from the seeds which fall from the fruits, and of 
which the largest are only two or three feet in thickness.” t 
M. de Monconys, a French traveller, visited the Cedars in 1647, on his return from Damascus and 
Baalbec, and says: “ There may have been twenty-five or thirty. There are some very large trees, of 
which the base is divided into three or four large trunks, but they only form one tree.” 1 
Thevenot, who in 1655 visited Lebanon, writes : “ It is folly to say that when one counts the Cedars 
of Lebanon twice, one finds a different number; for there is, in all of them, only twenty-three, large and 
small.” § 
Castillo, a Spanish priest and apostolic preacher of some eminence, who made a pilgrimage to the 
Holy Land about the middle of the seventeenth century, speaks of the Cedars as objects of interest, but 
gives no details regarding them. II 
In 1666, the same number as was found by Thevenot (twenty-three) remained, according to the 
relation of the Chevalier D’Arvieux, who counted them in company with several persons, who all arrived at 
the same number.H 
Between the years 1666 and 1669, a German priest, Brother Ferdinand von Troilo, travelled through 
the East, and saw the Cedars. He says nothing definite of their number, and little of their size, but 
alludes to the supposed impossibility of counting the trees, and explains it by some of the trees having their 
main stem almost covered with the earth, and four, five, or six large trunks proceeding out of it, which are 
counted each as a tree by some; while, by others, they are reckoned only as the branches of one tree. 4 ”' 
A few years later, in 1675, Cornelius Le Brun, or Le Bruyn, as his name is sometimes written (con¬ 
verted by Loudon, through a clerical error, into La Bruyere), a Flemish traveller, visited the Cedars. He 
is one of the few authors who happens to have made the visit in the winter time; and we thus have from 
him a personal account of the climate to which the Cedars are exposed during the severer portion of each 
year, and are able to contrast it with that at the present day. He gives two plates shewing the trees 
* Fermanel, &c., Voyage d’ltalie et du Levant. 1670, p. 209. 
+ La Terre Sainte, par F. Eugene Roger, Missionaire de Barbarie. Paris, 1646, p. 417. 
| Journal des Voyages de M. de Monconys. Lyons, 1665, p. 352. 
§ Thevenot, Relation d’un Voyage fait au Levant. 1664. First Part, p. 443. 
II El Devoto Peregrino Viage de Tierre Santa, compresto par El Padre Fr. Antonio del Castillo. Toledo, 1660, p. 339. 
IT Memoires du Chev. D’Arvieux, recueillis par le P. Labat. Paris, 1735. Vol. ii. p. 409. 
** Ferd. von Troilo, Orientalische Reise Beschreibung in Jahren 1666-1669. Dresden, 1667, p. 49. 
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