24 
CEDRUS LIBANI 
his companion, the Rev. J. King, who omitted the saplings, made the number 321. “I know not,” he says, 
“ why travellers have so long and so generally given twenty-eight, twenty, fifteen, and five, as the number of 
the Cedars. It is true, that of those of superior size and antiquity, there are not a greater number, but then 
there is a regular gradation in size, from the largest down to the merest sapling.” * * * § 
The recent evidence of Admiral Washington’s expedition, however, proves that this last statement is 
inaccurate, and that the older trees can easily be separated from the younger. 
The Cedars were visited in 1829 by Dr. Pariset, who in terms rather grandiloquent and senti¬ 
mental, gave an account of his visit in a letter to M. Loiseleur Deslongchamps, which was published 
by him in his “ Histoire du Cedre ” in 1837. He says: “The large Cedars, in fact, are very few in 
number: I do not think that I counted more than a dozen : I did not measure their circumference, but I 
had still before my eyes the columns, which, to the number of nearly one hundred and thirty, fill one of the 
halls of the palace of Carnac; they are nearly 40 feet in girth; each is very nearly the dimensions of the 
large Cedars. . . . As to the smaller Cedars, different in age and shape, I do not think that I say too 
much in carrying the number up to four or five hundred.” 
M. Geramb, a monk of La Trappe, who visited the Grove in 1832, incidentally tells us the number 
of the large trees, in refuting the depreciatory remarks of Volney. “Instead of ‘four or five thick 
trees,’ I have counted at least thirteen or fourteen, not only as thick as the thickest trees that I ever 
met with in my peregrinations, but so thick that several of them are six or seven fathoms in circumference. 
« 
Some at a certain height divide into five or six principal branches, which, issuing from the same stem, form 
so many new trees, planted as it were in the trunk, and of such diameter that two men cannot span them.”f 
In the same year (1832), Lamartine visited the Grove, and his account almost exactly cor¬ 
responds with the present state of the Grove. He says: “These trees diminish in number every age. 
Travellers formerly counted thirty or forty—more recently, seventeen; and at a later date but twelve. 
There are now but seven, which, from their massiveness and general appearance, may be fairly pre¬ 
sumed to have existed in Biblical times. . . . There still remains a little grove of young Cedars, appear¬ 
ing to me to form a group of from four hundred to five hundred trees or shrubs.”! 
M. Leon de Laborde, the celebrated traveller and artist, travelled through Syria and the East about 
the same time; and in the large work which he published shortly afterwards, his pencil has preserved to 
us admirable views of this scenery. After describing the ascent he says, “In less than half an hour we 
seat ourselves in the shade of these grand old trees. In former times they covered Lebanon; now-a-days 
they are scattered on three small hillocks, surrounded like an amphitheatre with more elevated summits, 
forming a barrel-shaped valley, so that one can only see that clump of trees at some distance from one 
direction. An hour before reaching Bechaia the guides had pointed out their tops. This clump of about 
four hundred trees detaches itself upon the snow in complete isolation. ... It is an oasis of Cedars in 
the midst of a desert of snow. . . . Here they reign despotically. They are alone, and spread around 
them without any mixture the agreeable odour which is peculiar to them. There are no more than seven, 
entirely old and very large. One of these is more than 50 feet in circumference.” § 
Our next authority is M. Laure, an officer in the French Marines, who, in company with the Prince 
de Joinville, visited Mount Lebanon in 1836. His father gives an account of his journey in the Cultivateur 
Provengal ,, which is quoted by Loiseleur Deslongchamps in his “ Histoire du Cedre.” “ Fifteen of the 
sixteen Cedars mentioned by Maundrell are still alive, but are all more or less in a state of decay; and one 
of them is remarkable for three immense trunks proceeding from the same stump, at a short distance above 
the soil. Another, one of the healthiest of the old trees, though perhaps the smallest, measured 35 feet 9 
* Memoir of the Rev. Pliny Fisk, late Missionary to Palestine. Boston, 1828, p. 327. 
f Pilgrimage to Palestine, 1840, vol. ii. p. 1015'. 
t Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, made during a Tour in the East. By Alphonse de Lamartine. Translated by Hill, 1837, vol. ii. p. 69. 
§ Voyage de la Syrie. By Leon de Laborde. Paris, 1837, p. 31. / 
inches 
