The Folk-lore of Plants

"Spirit they owned not, Sense they had not, Blood nor vigour, Nor colour fair. Spirit gave Odhinn, Thought gave Hoenir, Blood gave Lodr And colour fair." This notion of tree-descent appears to have been popularly believed in olden days in Italy and Greece, illustrations of which occur in the literature of that period. Thus Virgil writes in the AEneid[7]: "These woods were first the seat of sylvan powers, Of nymphs and fauns, and savage men who took Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak." Romulus and Remus had been found under the famous Ficus Ruminalis, which seems to suggest a connection with a tree parentage. It is true, as Mr. Keary remarks,[8] that, "in the legend which we have received it is in this instance only a case of finding; but if we could go back to an earlier tradition, we should probably see that the relation between the mythical times and the tree had been more intimate." Juvenal, it may be remembered, gives a further allusion to tree descent in his sixth satire[9]: "For when the world was new, the race that broke Unfathered, from the soil or opening oak, Lived most unlike the men of later times."