The Oldest Living Things
The oldest living things on this earth are trees. Given favorable conditions for growth and sustenance, the average tree will never die of old age—its death is merely an accident. Other younger and more vigorous trees may spring up near it, and perhaps rob its roots of their proper nourishment; insects may kill it, floods or winds may sweep it away, or its roots may come in contact with rock and become so gnarled and twisted, because they have not room to expand in their growth, that they literally throttle the avenues of its sustenance; but these are accidents. If such things do not happen a tree may live on for century after century, still robust, still flourishing, sheltering with its wide-spreading branches the men and women of age after age.
There is a yew-tree in the church-yard at Fortingal, in Perthshire, which de Candolle, nearly a century ago, proved to the satisfaction of botanists to be over twenty-five centuries old, and another at Hedsor, in Buclas, which is three thousand two hundred and forty years old. How de Candolle arrived at an apparently correct estimate of the enormous age of these living trees is a simple thing, and the principle is doubtless well known to-day to all. The yew, like most other trees, adds one line, about the tenth of an inch, to its circumference each year. He proved this after an investigation extending over several years, and we know now, a hundred years later, that his deductions were correct. The old yew at Hedsor has a trunk twenty-seven feet in diameter, proving its great age, and it is in a flourishing, healthy condition now, like its brother at Fortingal.
Humboldt refers to a gigantic boabab tree in central Africa as the “oldest organic monument” in the world. This tree has a trunk twenty-nine feet in diameter, and Adanson, by a series of careful measurements, demonstrated conclusively that it had lived for not less than five thousand one hundred and fifty years.
Still, it is not the oldest organic monument in the world, as Humboldt declared, for Mexican scientists have proved that the Montezuma cypress at Chepultepec, with a trunk one hundred and eighteen feet and ten inches in circumference, is still older,—older, too, by more than a thousand years,—for it has been shown, as conclusively as these things can be shown, that its age is about six thousand two hundred and sixty years. To become impressed with wonder over this, one has only to dwell on that duration for a little while in thought.
The giant redwoods of California are profoundly impressive, not only by reason of their age and dimensions, but of their number. The sequoias of the Mariposa, Calaveras, and South Park groves are more than eighteen hundred in number. The age of the “grizzly giant,” in the Mariposa group, is four thousand six hundred and eighty years, while the prostrate monarch of the Calaveras grove, known as the “Father of the Forest,” with a circumference of a hundred and ten feet, and a height when standing of four hundred and thirty-five feet, is much older.