THE PERSONALITY OF TREES
How many of us think of trees almost as we do of the rocks and stones about us,—as all but inanimate objects, standing in the same relation to our earth as does the furry covering of an animal to its owner. The simile might be carried out more in detail, the forests protecting the continents from drought and flood, even as the coat of fur protects its owner from extremes of heat and cold.
When we come to consider the tree as a living individual, a form of life contemporaneous with our own, and to realise that it has its birth and death, its struggles for life and its periods of peace and abundance, we will soon feel for it a keener sympathy and interest and withal a veneration greater than it has ever aroused in us before.
Of all living things on earth, a tree binds us most closely to the past. Some of the giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands are thought to be four hundred years old and are probably the oldest animals on the earth. There is, however, nothing to compare with the majesty and grandeur of the Sequoias—the giant redwoods of California—the largest of which, still living, reach upward more than one hundred yards above the ground, and show, by the number of their rings, that their life began from three to five thousand years ago. Our deepest feelings of reverence are aroused when we look at a tree which was “one thousand years old when Homer wrote the Iliad; fifteen hundred years of age when Aristotle was foreshadowing his evolution theory and writing his history of animals; two thousand years of age when Christ walked upon earth; nearly four thousand years of age when the ‘Origin of Species’ was written. Thus the life of one of these trees spanned the whole period before the birth of Aristotle (384 B.C.) and after the death of Darwin (A.D. 1882), the two greatest natural philosophers who have lived.”
Considered not only individually, but taken as a group, the Sequoias are among the oldest of the old. Geologically speaking, most of the forms of life now in existence are of recent origin, but a full ten million of years ago these giant trees were developed almost as highly as they are to-day. At the end of the coal period, when the birds and mammals of to-day were as yet unevolved, existing only potentially in the scaly, reptile-like creatures of those days, the Sequoias waved their needles high in air.
In those days these great trees were found over the whole of Canada, Greenland, and Siberia, but the relentless onslaught of the Ice Age wrought terrible destruction and, like the giant tortoises among reptiles, the apteryx among birds, and the bison among mammals, the forlorn hope of the great redwoods, making a last stand in a few small groves of California, awaits total extinction at the hands of the most terrible of Nature’s enemies—man. When the last venerable giant trunk has fallen, the last axe-stroke which severs the circle of vital sap will cut the only thread of individual life which joins in time the beating of our pulses to-day with the beginning of human history and philosophy,—thousands of years in the past.
Through all the millions of years during which the evolution of modern forms of life has been going on, then as now, trees must have entered prominently into the environment and lives of the terrestrial animals. Ages ago, long before snakes and four-toed horses were even foreshadowed, and before the first bird-like creatures had appeared, winged reptile-dragons flew about, doubtless roosting or perching on the Triassic and Jurassic trees. Perhaps the very pieces of coal which are burned in our furnaces once bent and swayed under the weight of these bulky animals. Something like six millions of years ago, long-tailed, fluttering birds appeared, with lizard-like claws at the bend of their wings and with jaws filled with teeth. These creatures were certainly arboreal, spending most of their time among the branches of trees. So large were certain great sloth-like creatures that they uprooted the trees bodily, in order to feed on their succulent leaves, sometimes bending their trunks down until their branches were within reach.