Now whether the premises of the botanist will bear out this conclusion or not, is not a vital question. For the question at issue is, not, _How long_ it has lived, but, _Whether it has lived at all_, before the present moment. It is enough for our point that the tree does, in its concentric zones, afford ocular evidence of successive epochs of growth. And the proof of this would be equally good, if ten layers were deposited in a year, or if one deposit were made every ten years; equally good, if there were fifteen hundred zones, or if there were but five. It would be easy to confirm the testimony of the zones by that of other parts of the structure. The dimensions of the tree itself bear a fixed and, to a certain extent, recognisable ratio to its age; every leaf on a given twig has been successively developed from a leaf-bud, the opening of which and its elongation into a twig occupied, normally, a definite period; each bough, each of those mighty limbs, was once a twig, was once an undeveloped leaf-bud, whose expansion to its present condition was a process, of which time was an inseparable and, within certain limits, a mensurable element.
If, then, we were precluded from examining any other organism, as it proceeded from the formative hand of its Creator, than this single tree, we should be amply warranted in inferring a past existence (be it longer or shorter, which is no matter) from the phenomena of its structure, which inference the fact of its creation would flatly contradict.
"There is a kind of character in thy life That to th' observer doth thy history Fully unfold.----" (_Shakspeare._)
Leaving the vegetable kingdom, those organisms which, though beautiful indeed and instructive, are yet inanimate, let us seek others which are endowed with a higher style of life, a life which is distinguished by a measure of consciousness of the exterior world, and a perception of relations to it. Let us look for animals.
We retrace our steps to the verge of the rippling sea, where the belt of umbrageous Mangroves fringes its margin. Beneath the arching roots of these are now reposing in the warm sunlit shallows many creatures which number this as the first day of their existence. It is their natal, or rather (to make a word) their _creatal_ day.