Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 December 1884 — A Carious Fir Tree. [ARTICLE]

A Carious Fir Tree.

Switzerland has its old chestnut trees on the banks of Lake Leman, and the ancient linden of Fribourg, the history of which is said to go back to the time of the conflicts with Charles the Bold. M. Louis Pire, President of the Itoyal Botanical Society of Belgium, has found a fir tree in the forest of Alliaz, Canton of Yaud, which he believes to be still older than the linden of Fribourg, and considers entitled to be regarded as the oldest and most remarkable tree in the canton, if not in the whole confederation. It is growing near the baths of Alliaz, at a height of abont 1,300 feet above the hotel, and 4,500 feet above the sea, surrounded by a forest of firs, which it overtops by more than thirty feet. The trunk of this tree is ten meters, or a little more than thirty feet, in circumference at the base. At about a yard from the ground it puts out, on the south side, seven offshoots, which have grown into trunks as strong and vigorous as those of the other, trees in the forest. Bent and gnarled at the bottom, these sidetrunks soon straighten themselves up and rise perpendicularly and parallel to the main stem. This feature is not, perhaps, wholly unparalleled, bat another most curious fact is that the two largest of the side-trunks are connected with the principal stem by sub-quad-rangular braces resembling girders. These beams have probably been formed by an anastomosing of branches, which, common enough among angiosperms, is extremely rare among conifers ; but it has been impossible to ascertain the planner in wliioh the ingrowing of one branch into another has been effected. The adaptation by which a limb, originally destined to grow free and bear foliage, has been converted into a living stick of timber, is a strange one, and affords a new illustration of the power of nature to fit itself to circumstances. The space between the rough flooring formed by the growing together of the offshoots, at their point of departure, and the girder-limbs, is large enough to admit of building a comfortable hermit’s hut within it. “““