Nay, what is the law by which its natural life is measured? What makes a tree 'old'? One sees the
Spanish-chesnut trunks among the Apennines growing into caves, instead of logs. Vast hollows, confused among the recessed darknesses of the marble crags, surrounded by mere laths of living stem, each with its coronal of glorious green leaves. Why can't the tree go on, and on,—hollowing itself into a Fairy—no—a Dryad, Ring,—till it becomes a perfect Stonehenge of a tree? Truly, "I am not sent to tell thee, for I do not know."
The worst of it is, however, that I don't know one thing which I ought very thoroughly to have known at least thirty years ago, namely, the true difference in the way of building the trunk in outlaid and inlaid wood. I have an idea that the stem of a palm-tree is only a heap of leaf-roots built up like a tower of bricks, year by year, and that the palm tree really grows on the top of it, like a bunch of fern; but I've no books here, and no time to read them if I had. If only I were a strong giant, instead of a thin old gentleman of fifty-five, how I should like to pull up one of those little palm-trees by the roots—(by the way, what are the roots of a palm like? and, how does it stand in sand, where it is wanted to stand, mostly? Fancy, not knowing that, at fifty-five!)—that grow all along the Riviera; and snap its stem in two, and cut it down the middle. But I suppose there are sections enough now in our grand botanical collections, and you can find it all out for yourself. That you should be able to ask a question clearly, is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered; and I think this chapter of mine will at
least enable you to ask some questions about the stem, though what a stem is, truly, "I am not sent to tell thee, for I do not know."
Knaresborough, 30th April, 1876.
I see by the date of last paragraph that this chapter has been in my good Aylesbury printer's type for more than a year and a half. At this rate, Proserpina has a distant chance of being finished in the spirit-land, with more accurate information derived from the archangel Uriel himself, (not that he is likely to know much about the matter, if he keeps on letting himself be prevented from ever seeing foliage in spring-time by the black demon-winds,) about the year 2000. In the meantime, feeling that perhaps I am sent to tell my readers a little more than is above told, I have had recourse to my botanical friend, good Mr. Oliver of Kew, who has taught me, first, of palms, that they actually stitch themselves into the ground, with a long dipping loop, up and down, of the root fibres, concerning which sempstress-work I shall have a month's puzzlement before I can report on it; secondly, that all the increment of tree stem is, by division and multiplication of the cells of the wood, a process not in the least to be described as 'sending down roots from the leaf to the ground.' I suspected as much in beginning to revise this chapter; but hold to my judgment in not cancelling it. For this multiplication of the cells is at least compelled by an influence which passes from the leaf to the ground, and vice versa; and which is at present best
conceivable to me by imagining the continual and invisible descent of lightning from electric cloud by a conducting rod, endowed with the power of softly splitting the rod into two rods, each as thick as the original one. Studying microscopically, we should then see the molecules of copper, as we see the cells of the wood, dividing and increasing, each one of them into two. But the visible result, and mechanical conditions of growth, would still be the same as if the leaf actually sent down a new root fibre; and, more than this, the currents of accumulating substance, marked by the grain of the wood, are, I think, quite plainly and absolutely those of streams flowing only from the leaves downwards; never from the root up, nor of mere lateral increase. I must look over all my drawings again, and at tree stems again, with more separate study of the bark and pith in those museum sections, before I can assert this; but there will be no real difficulty in the investigation. If the increase of the wood is lateral only, the currents round the knots will be compressed at the sides, and open above and below; but if downwards, compressed above the knot and open below it. The nature of the force itself, and the manner of its ordinances in direction, remain, and must for ever remain, inscrutable as our own passions, in the hand of the God of all Spirits, and of all Flesh.
"Drunk is each ridge, of thy cup drinking,
Each clod relenteth at thy dressing,
Thy cloud-borne waters inly sinking,