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 of tree-descent, it is evident, as Mr.
Keary points out, that, "there was once a fuller meaning than metaphor
in the language which spoke of the roots and branches of a family, or in
such expressions as the pathetic "Ah, woe, beloved shoot!" of
Euripides."[12] Furthermore, as he adds, "Even when the literal notion of
the descent from a tree had been lost sight of, the close connection
between the prosperity of the tribe and the life of its fetish was often