: tree can accomplish in rivalry of nations and of royal dynasties, no doubt it will achieve in our own tranquil and impregnable island; should, our princely parks and patrician homes, the "stately" and "ancestral ones of old England, continue as they are, in 500 years there may still be Anakim in the land, trees as glorious to behold as any the world has seen; but to predict it as a certainty who shall venture? The gradual disappearance from the surface of the earth of trees such as belonged to the first ages, seems far more likely to come of the dominion of man than a constant succession and renewal of them in a country that has undergone changes and vicissitudes so great and terrible as those which have fallen upon widowed Palestine, the wonder is rather that there should have survived any trees whatever of long inheritance, than that big and imposing terebinths should be unknown. Scattered up and down the land, in the days of the prophets, there were no doubt "memorial terebinths," just as in England we have "memorial oaks" and "memorial yews; "1 and concealed more or less in the depths of the forests, there were plenty also, no doubt, of majestic ones. We have no more right to assume the non-existence of great terebinths because the dimensions of their descendants are inconsiderable, than an Icelander would have justification, supposing no others to be extant, in thinking that the oak began and ended in the scrubby occupants of the hedgerow. Scripture makes positive mention of large and colossal terebinths. Individuals of this kind of tree were evidently familiar objects in the landscape; they served as landmarks, and to furnish names for the localities in which they grew. As ordinarily met with to-day, the terebinth attains the stature of thirty or thirty-five feet. The root is substantial, and penetrates deeply into the ground; the boughs spread widely, and at a considerable angle, and being clothed, except in winter, with dark and shining foliage, the tree presents, during the larger portion of the year, a beautiful and conspicuous spectacle. The reddish hue of the branches, and of the petioles, especially while the parts are young, contributes to the pleasing effect. The leaves, which individually are three or four inches long, consist of about seven ovate-lanceolate leaflets disposed in a pinnate manner. The flowers are borne in racemes, and though small and insignificant, somewhat like those of the grape-vine, are pretty, being yellowish, with crimson stigmas. In due time they are succeeded by dark blue drupes the size of peas, but ovoid, in substance dry, and containing each a solitary and bony seed, the kernel of which is oleaginous and edible. The foliage and the flowers alike evolve a resinous odour, which is diffused like that of the sweet-briar, especially towards evening, and when the day has been warm. Though de 1 For example: the Hatfield oak, under the shadow of which Queen Elizabeth pursued her studies when a girl; the Winfield oak; the Torwood oak; and Anne Boleyn's oak. Also in Scotland, the Wallace oak; the oak of Elderslie; the Ankerwyke yew; and the Fortingall yew. Compare Queen Mary's Thorn, and the Gospel Beech, in Gloucestershire. It ciduous, the terebinth is thus a tree of many attractions. It occurs not only in Palestine, in the highlands of which country, in the west and north-west, where the breeze from the sea is plainly perceived, it is specially abundant;-it belongs also to Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, the south of France, Spain, and the north of Africa. In Syria it covers entire mountains. The Greeks and Romans of course could not fail to be well acquainted with it, the former calling it, originally, répμivos. Dioscorides remarks that upon Mount Ida and in Macedonia it is small, but in Syria and about Damascus large and fine. Theocritus mentions it in his first Epigram. Virgil refers to the deep colour of the wood (En. x. 136). In the island of Scio the resinous matter which diffuses the scent is collected in quantity by means of incisions made in the trunk. When extracted it yields an odour resembling that of jessamine-flowers or the citron, and gradually hardens into a translucent solid,-the Chian turpentine of commerce. The terebinth was introduced into England in 1656, but has never become common, being rather too tender for our northern climate. has many times been figured; never, perhaps, more meritoriously than by that excellent and industrious lady, Elizabeth Blackwell, who, a hundred years before women were thought capable of Art and Science, set an example to her sex in regard to the illustration of Botany that well compared, to say the least, with her devotedness as a wife. Always fond of plants and flowers, and gifted with a happy talent for drawing, by letting her affections and her accomplishments run hand-in-hand, this good woman balanced her husband's failures as a physician, and on one occasion even rescued him from prison. Befriended by the curator of the famous old "Physic Garden" still in existence at Chelsea, she prepared drawings of no fewer than 500 of the plants valuable or of repute in medicine, then with her own hand engraved them upon copper, and coloured everything after nature—a marvellous work when we consider the time and circumstances under which it was accomplished. The publication took place during 1737-1739. Compared with more modern books, no doubt the "Herbarium" is antiquated. But the honour remains; and as in the case of Ursinus, if we would be just, let us never forget the pioneers. Besides, while a model of painstaking, it is a woman's work, and what women have done for the world manliness can never afford to overlook. Boissier, it is proper to add, in his new Flora Orientalis, separates the terebinth of the Holy Land from the usual form of the tree, and describes it under the name of Pistacia Palestina (vol. ii. p. 6). That the Hebrews clearly distinguished the terebinth from the oak, with which latter it has nothing in common, botanically, as they could hardly fail to perceive, is shown in two separate and independent places, a circumstance that ought to furnish a final answer to the interpreters who contend that the names alon and alûh signify the same thing, and that the terebinth is never mentioned. In Isaiah vi. 13, we have “ As an eláh and an alon," as a terebinth and as an oak,-" whose substance is in them when they cast their leaves, so the holy seed shall be the substance thereof." Secondly, in Hosea iv. 13, "They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks, and libneh, and terebinths, because the shadow thereof is good." Perplexingly enough to the plain English reader, the Authorized Version translates elûh in the Isaiah verse by "teil tree," communicating the wrong impression that some kind of lime, linden, or Tilia, is intended; while in the Hosea passage the word is quite as mistakenly rendered "elm." Neither the lime nor the elm is anywhere really mentioned in Holy Writ; and the two names must be regarded simply as illustrations of the uncertainty in which, at a time when botanical knowledge of any kind was thin and meagre, and Scripture Botany was matter chiefly of surmise, the pious men who had to deal with the words denoting plants were constantly and hopelessly plunged. The association of the elah with the alon, and the derivation of both names from the same radical, seems to indicate, pretty certainly, for what purpose it is cited, thus what the tree stands for in the representative language of nature. As stated above, it denotes the strong, the stalwart, and the enduring. Nothing, therefore, could serve better to illustrate the prophet's assurance that the "holy seed" shall never perish, though winter may strip off the foliage, and the branches awhile seem dead. The other principal passages where the terebinth is mentioned, no doubt with the same significance deeply embedded in them, though not visible, occur in the historical books:-"There came an angel of the Lord, and sat under a terebinth which was in Ophrah,” whereupon the son of the owner of the tree prepared a meal for the celestial visitor, "and brought it to him under the terebinth" (Judges vi. 11-19). Then in 1 Sam. xvii. 2, when Saul and the Philistines were about to engage in mortal conflict, the king "and the men of Israel were gathered together, . . . and pitched by the valley of Elah," literally, "in the valley of the terebinth," a place evidently named after a great terebinth that stood either in it, or close by, and which served to indicate it topographically. The expression recurs in verse 19, and again in xxi. 9, when reference is made to David's encounter with Goliath :-" the Philistine, whom thou slewest in the valley of Elah.” Further on, in the second book of the same chronicler, we have the terebinth mentioned in the account of the death of the wretched Absalom :-" And Absalom rode upon a mule, and the mule went under the thick boughs of the great terebinth, and his head caught hold of the terebinth, and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth, and the mule that was under him went away; . . . and Joab... took three darts in his hand, and thrust them through the heart of Absalom, while he was yet alive in the midst of the terebinth" (2 Sam. xviii.). Both in the incident just quoted, and in the narrative relating to Goliath, it is very plainly proved that there must have been terebinths in ancient Palestine of striking character and large dimensions. No mean example of its species could have been the tree that gave name to the valley; and here, in the account of the death of Absalom, it is to be observed that the tree so singularly and shockingly fatal to him is not called a terebinth, but "the great" terebinth-one that no doubt was famed for its magnitude. Joab's informant uses the very same expression :-"A certain man told Joab, I saw Absalom hanging in the terebinth." By not properly following the use of the definite article, when employed in the original, the Authorized Version has here, as in many other cases, weakened the force and sense of the inspired language,—a circumstance much to be lamented. Compare, for instance, the defective rendering in the history of Hagar in the wilderness, where, instead of a fountain of water, it should be the fountain of water, as indeed the next clause of the verse acknowledges, calling it "the fountain in the way to Shur." Another Old Testament allusion to the terebinth occurs in 1 Kings xiii. 14, " And he" (the "old prophet who dwelt in Bethel"). "went after the man of God, and found him sitting under a terebinth, .... and said unto him, Come home with me, and eat bread." The tree beneath which Jacob hid the idols, "all the strange gods which were in their hand" (Gen. xxxv. 4), would also appear to have been a terebinth. In Isaiah, again (i. 30), we have "For ye"-the transgressors—" shall be as a terebinth, whose leaf fadeth, and as a garden that hath no water;" while in Ezekiel, vi. 13, it appears in the same connection as in Hosea: "Then ye shall know I am the Lord, when their slain shall be among the idols round about their altars, upon every high hill, in all the tops of the mountains, and under every green tree, and under every thick terebinth, the place where they did offer sweet savour to all their idols." When, however, in 1 Chron. x. 12, in the repetition of the history of the dreadful end of Saul, it is stated that his bones, and those of his sons, were buried under an elûh, the word seems to be there through some error of the scribe,-an error to be accounted for in the same way as the mistaken mention by the same pen of almug and ahalim,-since the older and more trustworthy account, in 1 Sam. xxxi. 13, says that the interment was made beneath an eshel. Eshel, as we shall see presently, appears to have denoted, with the Hebrews, the tree now called the tamarisk. Fortunately, in this instance, the Authorized Version has not embarrassed the reader, rendering eshel simply by "tree." In the Apocrypha (Ecclus. xxiv. 16), wisdom is compared to "a terebinth that stretcheth forth her branches." 29. THE LENTISK (Pistacia Lentiscus. Nat. Ord. Anacardiaceae). This interesting tree, a member of the same genus as the terebinth, is mentioned in the Story of Susannah. In canonical Scripture it finds no place, and this may seem a reason for excluding it from the list of Bible plants; but little as the Apocrypha may contain that in constructive hands is convertible into creed, the doctrines are good and pure, and the plants of which it makes mention cannot be skipped without loss and injustice. The Story, it will be remembered, is one of the curious addenda to the Book of Daniel. Founded probably upon some actual occurrence, in its present form it is to be regarded as a kind of moral tale, designed to convey a lesson on the beauty of chastity, the names and circumstances a little altered in the telling, just as in Milton's "Comus" we have the actual adventure exquisitely mantled and flowered over with romance : "Mortals that would follow me, Love virtue: she alone is free. Heaven itself would stoop to her." The lentisk is frequent in the Levantine countries, and extends to Italy, Sicily, and northern Africa. As a tree, it bears little comparison with the terebinth, attaining no greater stature than twenty feet. It differs also in being evergreen, and in the leaves, which are abruptly pinnate, and much smaller, the leaflets about eight in number, and lanceolate, and the rachis much dilated. The flowers, which are green and insignificant, come out in little, loose, axillary clusters, and are followed by small berries. From the earliest times of the observation of plants, the lentisk has been noted as the source of mastich, that delicate species of gum, which, when dried, or as met with in commerce, resembles little tears of limpid and shining amber. The Greeks called this tree oxivos (the name it goes by in the Story, which was originally written in the Greek language), and which, being applied to it by their authors, Theophrastus and Dioscorides, was taken up by Pliny. Theocritus alludes to it in Idyll v. 129, and vii. 133. Introduced to England in 1664, it occurs now and then in curious gardens, and is another of the plants of which a picture was prepared by Mrs. Blackwell (Herbarium, fol. 195). (To be continued.) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.1 WE who live at a period in the history of the Church when the various sects into which the Church is divided are marked off from each other by sharp lines of dogmatic distinction, can form but a faint idea of the undogmatic character of the early church. Jesus Christ and Him crucified formed the grand theme of apostolic preaching; and would that this great central truth still drew men's thoughts and affections more powerfully towards and around it! Yet even in the Apostolic Church this was not a solitary though a predominant subject of instruction and contemplation. The Apostles' Creed, which was not, however, the production of a single mind nor even of a single age, shows within how small a compass the early Church expressed the 1 A History of the Catholic Church of Jesus Christ from the Death of St. John to the Middle of the Second Century; including an account of the original Organization of the Christian Ministry and the Growth of Episcopacy. By Thomas Wimberly Mossman, B.A., Rector of Torrington, Lincolnshire. London: Longman, Green, & Co., 1873. |