Mr. Thorpe,[4] again, considers it identical with the “Robur Jovis,” or sacred oak of Geismar, destroyed by Boniface, and the Irminsul of the Saxons, the Columna Universalis, “the terrestrial tree of offerings, an emblem of the whole world.”  At any rate the tree of the world, and the greatest of all trees, has long been identified in the northern mythology as the ash tree,[5] a fact which accounts for the weird character assigned to it amongst all the Teutonic and Scandinavian nations, frequent illustrations of which will occur in the present volume.  Referring to the descent of man from the tree, we may quote the Edda, according to which all mankind are descended from the ash and the elm.  The story runs that as Odhinn and his two brothers were journeying over the earth they discovered these two stocks “void of future,” and breathed into them the power of life[6]: 

  “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.”

In Greece the oak as well as the ash was accounted a tree whence men had sprung; hence in the “Odyssey,” the disguised hero is asked to state his pedigree, since he must necessarily have one; “for,” says the interrogator, “belike you are not come of the oak told of in old times, nor of the rock."[10] Hesiod tells us how Jove made the third or brazen race out of ash trees, and Hesychius speaks of “the fruit of the ash the race of men.”  Phoroneus, again, according to the Grecian legend, was born of the ash, and we know, too, how among the Greeks certain families kept up the idea of a tree parentage; the Pelopidae having been said to be descended from the plane.  Among the Persians the Achaemenidae had the same tradition respecting the origin of their house.[11] From the numerous instances illustrative