254 
PRUNING AND THINNING. 
[Part IV. 
think this before Adanson gave us his measure¬ 
ments and guesses? I’ll be bound that he did 
not. I’ll be bound that the first philosopher has 
taken the second philosopher’s calculations for 
granted; and, as the cypress exceeds the baobab 
in measurement, he concludes, naturally, that 
the cypress also exceeds the baobab in years. 
If the two philosophers are right, the two trees 
are slow growers. The measurement given of 
the cypress is 117 feet in girthing. This is 
about thirty-nine feet in diameter; and, suppos¬ 
ing the annual ring to be the twenty-ninth part 
of an inch in width, which is the rate of growth 
assigned by Adanson to the baobab, the age of 
the cypress should be 6786 years. So that 
u the seedling began to vegetate” nearly a thou¬ 
sand years before the creation of man according 
to the Hebrew text of the Mosaic writings. If 
the width of the annual ring were one-eighth of 
an inch, the tree would attain the size of thirty- 
nine feet in diameter in 1872 years. If the 
width of the annual ring were one-fourth of an 
inch, the diameter of the tree would have been 
thirty-nine feet in 936 years ; and the Monte¬ 
zuma cypress would have been about 400 years 
old at the conquest of Mexico. This is, per¬ 
haps, more likely than that it should be a thou- 
