Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/96

 *[Footnote: The monumental character of these colossal living vegetable forms, and the kind of reverence which has been felt for them among all nations, have occasioned in modern times the bestowal of greater care in the numerical determination of their age and the size of their trunks. The results of these inquiries have led the author of the important treatise, "De la longévité des Arbres," the elder Decandolle, Endlicher, Unger, and other able botanists, to consider it not improbable that the age of several individual trees which are still alive goes back to the earliest historical periods, if not of Egypt, at least of Greece and Italy. It is said in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, 1831, T. lxvii. p. 50:—"Plusieurs exemples semblent confirmer l'idée qu'il existe encore sur le globe des arbres d'une antiquité prodigieuse, et peut-être témoins de ses dernières révolutions physiques. Lorsqu'on regarde un arbre comme un agrégat d'autant d'individus soudés ensemble qu'il s'est développé de bourgeons à sa surface, on ne peut pas s'étonner si, de nouveaux bourgeons s'ajoutant sans cesse aux anciens, l'agrégat qui en résulte n'a point de terme nécessaire à son existence." In the same manner Agardh says:—"If in trees there are produced in each solar year new parts, so that the older hardened parts are replaced by new ones capable of conducting sap, we see herein a type of growth limited only by external causes." He ascribes the shortness of the life of herbs, or of such plants as are not trees, "to the preponderance of the production of flowers and fruit over the formation of leaves." Unfruitfulness is to a plant a prolongation of life. Endlicher cites the example of a plant of Medicago sativa, var. [Greek: b] versicolor,]*