though so widely disconnected from the Taurus forest, can be regarded in no other light than as an outlying member of the latter. After speaking of the Algerian cedar and the deodar, Sir Joseph says that it is evident that the distinctions between them are so trivial, and so far within the proved limits of variation in coniferous plants, that it may reasonably be assumed that all originally sprang from one. There are no other distinctions whatever between them of bark, wood, leaves, male cones, anthers, or in their mode of germination, growth, or hardiness (but this has not been confirmed during the severe winters of a later date in England). Though the difference in the shape of the scales and seeds of Deodara and Libani are very marked, they vary much, many forms of each overlap, and further transitions between the most dissimilar may be established by the _ intercalation of seeds and scales from C. atlantica. Sir Joseph accounts for the difference in the habit of the three forms in a great measure by the climate of the three localities: the most sparse, weeping, long-leaved cedar is from the most humid region, the Himalaya; whilst atlantica, the form of most rigid habit, corresponds with the climate of the country under the influence of the great Sahara desert. No course remains, then, but to regard all as species, or all as varieties, or Deodara and atlantica as varieties of one species, and Libani as another. The hitherto adopted and only alternative of regarding Libani and atlantica as varieties of one species and Deodara as another species must be given up.
Ravenscroft, in Pinetum Britannicum, gives a very full account of the cedars of Lebanon from various sources, with four good illustrations from photographs taken by F.M. Good of Winchfield, and there are many points in his account worth referring to.
Mr. Ridgway of Fairlawn, who visited them in 1862, says[1] that there is a young tree 50 yards west of the chapel, of exactly the same form and habit as a deodar in his park near Tonbridge. It has the same graceful drooping habit, the same light silvery green, and none of the usual rigid horizontal form of the cedar. He says the remainder of the race of trees vary from 20 to 25 feet in girth; some are as tall and straight as poplars, some not above 20 feet high, and gnarled and stunted. Ravenscroft gives in a table the facts relating to the number of trees found in the accounts of various authors who have written on the Cedars of Lebanon, commencing with Belon in 1550 and ending with Canon Tristram in 1864. Of the older ones there were 28 in Belon's time, which are now reduced to about half that number. There is a gap of some centuries—Ravenscroft says probably more than 1000 years—between the cedars of the second size and the older ones, and again a very long interval of growth between all the young trees, which are now about 4oo. I do not find any reliable information, taken from an actual count of the number of rings in any of the old Cedars of Lebanon, as to what their possible age may be. Ravenscroft has gone very carefully into the question of the age of the Cedars of Lebanon, which, he says, may be from 4000 to 5000 years old; and he further gives a table based on 200 measurements of cedars of all ages in England, which shows that the average growth in height in England is about 1 foot per annum for trees up to sixty years
- ↑ Gard. Chron. 1862, p. 572.
