The Romance of Plant Life. Elliot George Francis Scott

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СКАЧАТЬ at Sancerre (France), and the other the famous specimen on Mount Etna. There are also eight olive trees in the garden of Gethsemane at Jerusalem, which are certainly 1000 years old, and were, according to tradition, in existence in the time of Jesus Christ.

      And yet all these trees are mere infants compared to Adanson's Baobab and the Dragon tree of Orotava. The celebrated traveller alluded to visited the Cape Verde islands in 1749 and found inscriptions made by English travellers on the trunk 300 years before his time. From the growth since then, he calculated that some of these trees were about 6000 years of age, and they were 27 feet in diameter.13

      The record is held by the Dragon tree of Orotava, in the Canary Islands.

      When the Spaniards landed in Teneriffe in 1402, its diameter was very nearly 42 feet. It was, however, greatly injured by a storm in 1827, and finally destroyed in 1851. (The wood was then made into walking-sticks and snuffboxes.) The age has been estimated at 10,000 years, or by other authorities at 8000 years only. The "dragon's blood" of the Canaries, a well-known remedy in the Middle Ages, was not, as is popularly supposed, derived from this tree, but was obtained from a totally different plant.

      But there is a hazy tradition to the effect that the story of the Dragon which guarded the golden fruit in the island of the Hesperides was nothing but a garbled account of this redoubtable veteran of the plant world.

      There is no particular advantage in growing to these enormous heights and clinging to life in this way for hundreds and thousands of years. Nature seems to have found this out and preferred the ordinary pines, oaks, and larches, which are mature in a few hundred years. In a thousand years, ten generations of larch or pine can be produced, and, as each is probably better than its predecessor, a distinct improvement in the type is possible. All these long-lived giants belong in fact to the less highly specialized orders of plants. They are like the primeval animals, the Mammoths, Atlantosauri, and Sabretoothed Tigers.

      Yet when we come to think of the many and diverse perils to which trees are exposed, the existence of even these exceptional monsters seems very wonderful.

      After a violent storm which had blown down many of the trees in a friend's park,14 I visited the scene of destruction and discovered what had apparently in almost every instance produced it. Rabbits had overthrown these trees!

      They had nibbled away part of the cork and part of the young wood on the projecting buttress-like roots at the base of the tree. In consequence, water, bacteria, and fungus spores had entered at the injured places, and part of the roots had become decayed and rotten. When the gale began to sway them backwards and forwards and a severe strain came on what should have been a sound anchoring or supporting buttress, the rotten part yielded, and these fine, beautiful trees fell a prey to the rabbit.

      The influence of forests and timber on the daily life of mankind is a most romantic and interesting chapter in history.

      Every savage tribe, every race of man, however degraded or backward, is acquainted with fire. Fuel is therefore a necessity of existence for all savages, and not merely for cooking. There is a very interesting passage in London's The Call of the Wild, when the Dog "Buck" in his dreams remembers a hairy man crouching over the fire with Buck's ancestor at his feet, whilst in the darkness all round them the firelight is reflected from eyes of wolves, bears, and even more terrible and dangerous brutes which have now happily vanished from the world. For protection at night fire was an absolute necessity. Even at that long-distant period, therefore, man had commenced to attack the forest. Unless one has had to tend a wood fire for twelve hours, it is difficult to realize what a quantity is required. To prepare fire was a long, laborious, and difficult operation; one piece of wood was placed on the ground and held in position by the toes, a pointed stick was taken between the two palms of the hand and twirled vigorously round and round until the heat was enough to ignite a piece of rotten wood placed as tinder.

      Therefore smouldering branches were kept always burning, as they are to-day amongst the Fuegians and some other savages. It was a sacred duty to watch this fire, and the woman (usually old) who was entrusted with the task was very probably put to death if she failed. From this very ancient savage custom probably arose the cult of the Vestal Virgins in Ancient Rome.15

      Another very important factor in savage life was the canoe or piroque necessary for fishing or to cross lakes and rivers. The first chantey of Rudyard Kipling has a probable theory, and is a beautiful account of how man first thought of using a floating log.16 They hollowed out the log and "dug out" the canoe, by first lighting a fire on it and then scraping away the cinders; then the sides were pressed out, and it was trimmed and straightened to the right shape. All this was the idea of some paleolithic genius far more persevering and ingenious than any marine architect of our own days.

      "Birchbark" canoes are not so common as Dug-outs. The tree, the White or Paper Birch, is found in Canada and the Northern United States; those Indians who discovered that the light, waterproof cork-bark could be fashioned into a canoe made a very great discovery, and indeed it was their canoes that made travel or exploration possible in North America.

      When man began to long for a settled permanent home, it was absolutely necessary to find a way of living in safety. Wolves, bears, hyenas and other animals were abundant; neighbours of his own or other tribes were more ferocious and more dangerous than wild beasts. Some neolithic genius imagined an artificial island made of logs in the midst of a lake or inaccessible swamp. Such were the lake dwellings which persisted into historic times, and which are indeed still in existence in some parts of the earth.17

      The trees were abundant; they could be felled by the help of fire and an axe, and the lake dwelling gave a secure defence. The wood of some of the piles supporting the great villages in Switzerland seems to be still sound, though it has been under water for many centuries. Some villages are said to have required hundreds of thousands of trees.

      The forest afforded man almost everything that he used, bows and arrows, shelter, fuel, and even part of his food.

      Nuts and fruits would be collected and when possible stored. In seasons of famine, they used even to eat the delicate inside portion of the bark of trees.

      But as soon as the first half-civilized men began to keep cattle, sheep, and especially goats, more serious inroads still were made upon the forest. Where such animals are allowed to graze there is no chance for wood to grow (at any rate in a temperate country). The growing trees and the branches of older ones are nibbled away whilst they are young and tender. The days of the forest were nearly over when cultivation commenced. Dr. Henry describes the process of "nomadic" culture in China as follows: "They burn down areas of the forest; gather one or two crops of millet or upland rice from the rich forest soil; and then pass on to another district where they repeat the destruction."18 A very similar process of agriculture existed until the eighteenth century in Scotland.

      Thus the forest was being burnt or cleared for cultivation. It was devastated by black cattle, goats, and other animals, and it was regularly exploited for fuel and building every day by every family for centuries.

      It is not, therefore, surprising that the ancient forests in Britain have disappeared. Dr. Henry mentions one square mile of virgin forest on the Clonbrock estate in Ireland. The Silva Caledonica of the Romans is said to exist in Scotland at the Blackwood of Rothiemurchus, at Achnacarry, and in a few other places. Of the original oak forest, which covered most of England and Southern Scotland, not a vestige (so far as is known to the writer) remains to-day.

      There are in places very ancient forests. A few miles from Retford are considerable remains of СКАЧАТЬ