A 557269
THE
STORY
BOOK
OF
SCIENCE
JEAN
HENRI
FABRE
1817 SCIENTIA
ARTES
VERITAS LIBRARY OF IGAN CHTHE MI TY I S R E V OF UNI
PLURICUS UMUM
TUEBOR
SI-QUERIS PENINS
ULAM AMENAM
CIRCUM
SPICE
From the Library of A. W. Diack
THE AGE OF TREES
43
greatest personages have esteemed it an honor to go and pray in this rustic sanctuary and meditate a moment under the shade of the old tree which has seen so many graves open and shut. According to its size, they consider this oak to be about nine hundred years old.
The acorn that produced it must,
then, have germinated about the year 1000.
To-day the old oak carries its monstrous branches without effort .
Glorified by men and ravaged by lightning,
it peacefully follows the course of ages , perhaps having before it a future equal to its past. " Much older oaks are known. In 1824 a woodcutter of Ardennes felled a gigantic oak in whose trunk were found sacrificial vases and antique coins . The old oak had had fifteen or sixteen centuries of existence .
"After the Allouville oak I will tell you of some more companions of the dead ; for it is above all in these fields of repose, where the sanctity of the place protects them against the injuries of man , that the trees attain such an advanced age. Two yews in the cemetery of Haie-de-Routot, department of Eure, merit attention above all.
In 1832 they shaded
with their foliage the whole of the field of the dead and a part of the church, without having experienced serious damage, when an extremely violent windstorm threw a part of their branches to the ground.
In spite of this mutilation these two yews
are still majestic old trees. Their trunks , entirely hollow, measure each of them nine meters in circumference . hundred years .
Their age is estimated at fourteen
44
THE STORY- BOOK OF SCIENCE
" That, however, is not more than half the age that some other trees of the same kind have attained. A yew in a Scotch cemetery measured twenty- nine meters around.
Its probable age was two thousand
five hundred years.
Another yew, also in a ceme
tery in the same country, was, in 1660 , so prodigious that the whole country was talking about it.
They
reckoned its age then at two thousand eight hundred and twenty-four years.
If it is still standing, this
patriarch of European trees bears the weight of more than thirty centuries. " Enough for the present. to talk. "
Now it is your turn
"I like better to be silent, Uncle Paul, " said Jules . "You have upset my mind with your trees that will not die." " I am thinking of the old yew in the Scotch ceme tery.
Did you say three thousand years ?" asked
Claire.
" Three thousand years, my dear child ; and we might go still further back, if I were to tell you of certain trees in foreign countries . to be almost as old as the world."
Some are known
CHAPTER X THE LENGTH OF ANIMAL LIFE
ULES and Claire could not get over the aston ishment caused by their uncle's story of the old trees to which centuries are less than years are to us .
Emile , with his usual restlessness , led the
conversation to another subject : " And animals , Uncle, " asked he, " how long do they live ?" " Domestic animals , " was the reply, " seldom at tain the age that nature allows them.
We grudge
them their nourishment, overtire them, and do not give them proper shelter.
And then, we take from
them their milk, fleece, hide, flesh, in fact everything. How can you ever grow old when the butcher is wait ing for you at the stable door with his knife ?
Use
less to speak of these poor victims of our need : to give us long life, they do not live out their time. Supposing that an animal is well treated , that it suf fers neither hunger nor cold, that it lives in peace without excessive fatigue , without fear of knacker or butcher ; under these good conditions , how many years will it live? "Let us begin with the ox. I hope.
Here is a robust one,
What chest and shoulders !
And then that
big square forehead, with its vigorous horns around which the strap of the yoke goes ; those eyes shining 45