philosopher, visited Egypt, B.C. 590, or about the time of the commencement of the Babylonian captivity under Nebuchadnezzar, he took olive-oil with him to exchange for more costly articles brought from India by the Arabian merchants;—and that Plato did the same, 200 years later, in order to pay the expenses of his journey.1

From Palestine it was, in all likelihood, that the olive was first conveyed to Europe, Greece receiving it in the first instance; though Ritter and Decandolle consider that possibly it may have been indigenous both to Asia Minor and the opposite coasts. In the Cyrenaica it was certainly plentiful in the time of Theophrastus. Homer had already referred to it many times, as in that beautiful passage at the beginning of the 17th book of the Iliad, where he compares the young and promising Euphorbus, slain by the Spartan, to an olivetree cast down by a tempest. Commingling readily with the aborigines, no doubt it would soon wear the semblance of a genuine native. The olive, as we should expect, has had its origin embedded in a myth, in the present instance a twofold one. When Athenë contended with the god of the sea, as to the right of bestowing a name upon the ancient capital of Hellas, the assembled deities decided that the choice should be allowed to that one of the two disputants who should present to mankind the most useful of possessions. The seagod gave the horse; Athenë gave the olive, and won: for the olive, said the gods unanimously, signifies peace, whereas the horse means war and bloodshed. The horse, as already mentioned when treating of the myrtle, was in ancient times identified purely with strife. Athene's tree was believed to be still standing many ages afterwards, embosomed in a grove which was accounted holy. Sophocles places it in the consecrated grove at Colonos to which Antigone conducts her blind old father, and says that here "dense flocks of winged nightingales are singing sweetly" (Ed. Col. 16). How beautiful is the idea of the introduction of the foliage into the veil woven by the chaste goddess when admitting Arachne to competition in skill, the web being "edged with wreaths of olive" (Ovid. Met. vi. 101).

The other tale, also Greek, is that Aristæus, son of Apollo, the best and noblest of the Grecian deities, learned from the nymphs who had charge of the Seasons how to cultivate the olive, and, simultaneously, the management of bees, and that settling himself in Greece, he was the first to bring the tree. Both fables are in high

1 Plutarch, Life of Solon. Herodotus, Book i., chap. 30.

degree poetical, therefore instructive. We cannot afford to overlook, and much less to despise them. They revolve, without a doubt, upon some point of simple matter-of-fact respecting which prose has recorded nothing, and the poets have thus had it all their own way. Sibthorp gives a drawing of an olive-spray in the splendid Flora Græca, pl. 3. Linnæus did not hesitate to name it Olea Europœa, though designing, perhaps, thereby to distinguish the historical olive more directly from other species of the same genus, found wild in China, North America, and at the Cape of Good Hope.

From Greece the olive soon found its way along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, taking so kindly to its new abodes, that as now beheld, it is difficult, as in the case of the myrtle, to believe it only a colonist. The Phoenicians, it is said, first planted it in the south of France, 680 B.C., though Pliny, who devotes the first five or six chapters of his 15th Book to the olive, seems to indicate a somewhat later date, saying that it was conveyed to Italy in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, 580 B.C. Prior to that period, he states, there were no olive-trees either in Italy or Spain, nor yet in Africa. But that they were long before known in Africa seems quite likely. Once introduced into any warm and comparatively dry situation, it was assiduously cultivated. What it has become in southern Europe in modern times may be imagined from the fact that in the neighbourhood of Nice alone, the olive-tree is now planted over an extent of 15,000 acres of ground. South of the Mediterranean it is met with as far as Cairo. The need of the olive-tree is not so much a high degree of summer warmth, which indeed is repugnant rather than welcome, as comparative exemption from severity of winter cold. A mean temperature of between 58° and 66° suits it best. In Europe it succeeds as far north as latitude 441°, or the middle of France. Another of its characteristics is capacity to flourish in the most sterile and rocky soil, where other vegetation would be likely to fail. Give it congenial temperature, and fair protection from strong and frosty winds, and it will thrive on the poorest land.

Difficiles primùm terræ, collesque maligni,

Tenuis ubi argilla, et dumosis calculus arvis,
Palladiâ gaudent silvâ vivacis oliva.

[First, indocile lands, and unfruitful hills, where lean clay abounds, and pebbles in the bushy fields, rejoice in Pallas' wood of long-lived olives.-Georgic II. 179-181.]

Showing itself thus tractable, in more modern times the olive has

been carried to many distant parts of the world. Cortes took the broad-leaved or Andalusian variety to Mexico, where the climate is generally as fine as that of Naples, and where the plant succeeds admirably. It also does extremely well on the western coast of Peru, appearing, on the heights, in south latitude 15° to 17°, and growing to the size of an apple-tree. The warm, dry countries of South America are just to its taste: it greatly enriches them ;-in Peru, near the sea, there are groves of olives close to plantations of aloes and water-melons; it thrives also in Chili. In North America the olive extends to scarcely 34° N. Lat., so much more severe is the winter on the other side of the Atlantic than in Europe.

In England, unfortunately, the olive-tree, like the date-palm, is seldom seen. The climate forbids its prospering in the open air, except in very sheltered situations in the extreme south and southwest, where it stands tolerably well, and occasionally bears fruit. Even in green-houses and conservatories it is rare, a circumstance manifestly attributable to its want of the gay features of the fuchsia and the camellia. One of the many varieties which have sprung up in course of time, a native of Nikita, in the Crimea, and thence called the Crimean olive, appears to be more hardy, and competent to take its place beside the laurel and the phillyrea.

The olive is by no means a uniformly large or picturesque tree. Often, especially when subjected to climatal vicissitudes, it has a stunted, and even a shabby appearance. But as with many other descriptions of tree, much depends on season and personal proximity. If, when no longer novel, the olive ceases to give much charm to the landscapes near Marseilles and Florence, as viewed while passing along, it is, probably, that they are seen under disadvantages. The distant impression is much the same with the olives of the Holy Land. "The olive, the fig, and the pomegranate," says Dean Stanley, "which form the usual arboreous vegetation of the country, are so humble in stature that they hardly attract the eye till the spectator is amongst them. Then, indeed, the twisted stems and silver foliage of the first, the dark broad leaf of the second, and the tender green and scarlet blossoms of the third, are among the most beautiful of sights, even stripped of the associations which would invest the tamest of their kind with interest." 1

When old, and of large dimensions, thirty to forty feet high, this

1 Sinai and Palestine, p. 139.

far-famed tree quite as often becomes magnificent; not so much because it is large, as by reason of the singular and inexpressibly antique physiognomy assumed by it with advancing age. The figure varies so immensely that, as with intensely aged oaks in our own country, it is impossible to find two individuals alike. The aspect is at once gloriously patriarchal and grotesque. The trunks are curiously cleft and torn, as it seems, into half-a-dozen shreds. So wild is their growth that one doubts whether the branches all proceed from a single trunk, or whether it is that two or three trees have become so fused and blended as to have lost their individuality. Grand examples of such old olives may be seen in the island of Majorca, also upon the Genoese Riviera, huge, lacerated, and seeming to have great holes through them. Mr. Ruskin's artistic account of the figure presented. by aged olive-trees, in the Stones of Venice (iii. 175-177) fanciful as may seem, is in no degree overdrawn.

it

(To be continued.)

SCIENCE AND THE CHURCH.

§3. THE modern point of contact between Science and the Church is significantly different from that of any former time. A clear sight of this difference will mean a clearer vision of the question so urgently demanding settlement to-day.

The history of religion and science may be written in one word— Cause. For what has each contended? For an explanation, according to its own sense, of all that is; and with this explanation is inherently bound up the idea of that which causes the things that be. The demand of religion has been for a cause supernatural; the consent of science to so much of cause as will serve to explain immediate facts —a consent, in its outcome, declaring for the self-causation of the universe. Such has been the more or less articulate meaning of science hitherto. Thus, however they may merge and blend and confusedly interlace through the irregular movement of individual opinion along their whole frontier line, yet the two powers, distinctively regarded, have been the respective champions, in their ultimate thought, of a supernatural and a natural cause; and this through all degrees of conception under which the idea could find place,-from debate of the god in the stone, tree, or star, to the power in human life and the cause of universal being.

With many scientific men, of course, their specific doctrine, in one or another form, held place side by side with religious ideas, nature and revelation being studied apart, and each from their own ground. There was no common solvent for them, nor was such asked or needed. It is not for us to inquire what, in this case, was the ruling love, and it would therefore be quite wrong to assume it. With exceptional men, with men of higher unitizing faculty, doubtless, the two ideas blended into an indistinguishable whole, which, in regard to the final cause, took its specific form of personal existence (in some indeterminate way related to the things created), or, again, of pantheistic essence, according to the tendency of the individual mind. But with others still, the case was different. Logical at the expense of feeling, they pushed their scientific conclusion to its last result, and were not afraid boldly to say that there was no scientific evidence for the popular religious notions of a cause behind and beyond the visible. As, in modern times, science perfected her instruments and widened her range of knowledge, certain hitherto accepted teachings of revelation were, by irresistible evidence, proved untrue. Knowledge having taken the place of speculation on certain points damaging to the claim of inspiration, some leading modern men of science have shewn a disposition to renounce the whole matter of revelation, as either a product of superstition, or as the natural development of reverential feeling fed by the contemplation of the inscrutable mystery. From this arose our modern secularism, oracular stumpings against religion, Music Hall denunciations of the Bible, Holyoake, Bradlaugh, and Co.'s attacks on and vilifications of the character of Jesus, appeals to working men to receive with all haste the new gospel of nature-these and such like, of which everybody knows something.

Whither, then, had this search for cause, this struggle about cause, led us? To what had it at last come? To a hand-to-hand conflict between the Church and materialism: was there, or was there not, a Living God-was there, or was there not, a power above and beyond nature, the Cause of its conditions and Itself unconditioned? Materialism and spiritualism—who should this Gordian knot unloose? For a time the battle raged; in a manner, yet continues; but its central fire has died out: only those still fight who do not know what the chief powers have settled. As the question of the day it has ceased. Materialism, as a philosophical explanation of existence, is an exploded doctrine.

To some this statement will be strange, if not startling, accustomed