GREAT TREES.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XLIII, Issue 2282, 29 January 1912, Page 7

GREAT TREES.

THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD. There are records of trees of vast age and size, whose death seems only to have been due to accident ; that is to say, to something in the external world and not in the tree itself, and something which can be avoided. Such a one was the huge dragontree of the Canary Islands ; discovered in the fifteenth century, it impressed the Spanish explorers with its enormous bulk, a nd even then had a great hollow in its trunk, eaten out by winds and waters. Blown down at last by a tempest in 1868, its age must have been several thousand years—several thousand years, be it remembered, of continuous growth. Then there was an enormous Baobab at Cape de Verde, whose age a French naturalist calculated from the number of annual rings of wood to be over five thousand years. Ages which must be measured thus* in thousands of years, are attained fairly frequently by certain other kinds of trees, such a:s the cedar and the sequoia gigantea or Big Tree of California. Now if we consider the conditions to which a tree like this is subjected, we shall wonder more and more at its reaching such an age in a state of nature. Prolonged drought may cripple it, lightning may split it, swarms of caterpillars devour its leaves, hordes of beetles ruin the young shoots, fungi eorrupt ite bark. A single hole in this protective sheath will let in corroding air and rain to eat out great hollows in the living wood beneath. Then comes a great storm—the tree eould have weathered it before, but now the weakened trunk gives way—and a H is over. One injury inflicted leaves the tree weaker and so more liable to others and makes it possible for influences that would have been harmless before to act injuriously. The wind that blew the tree down would hare been powerless if it hod not been for the hollow trunk ; this couM never have been eaten out but for the hole in the bark, which again was only there because of the attacks of parasites. Of this a curious instance may be given. In the forest of Compeigna there is now a rifle range down one of the great rides ; it is almost exclusively near the butts of this range that the trees are infested with Longicorn beetles ; and the cause of this is—bad marksmanship ! The trees here have been pierced with bullets, and their wounds have in the first place lowered their general vitality, so attracting the female Longicorns, who always prefer to lay their eggs on weakly trees, and, secondly, provided an actual passage, making it easier for the larvae to reach their chosen home just below the bark. These larvae are very destructive, so that the bullet-wounds not only weaken the tree directly, but betray it into the hands of new and otherwise powerless enemies. It is a geometrical, not an arithmetical progression of disasters. But the disasters are usually few and far between. Great droughts, or tempests, or floods do not come every day ; and it is these great exceptions that do the tree more harm than all the times between. The tree with but a few short centuries of life will have to weather only one or two ; but in five thousand years there is time and to spare "for every sort and kind of thing to happen.—"Cornhill Magazine."