[Illustration: 65.--SARGON OF ASSYRIA BEFORE THE SACRED TREE. (Perrot and Chipiez.)] 9. There can be no association of ideas more natural than that of vegetation, as represented by a tree, with life. By its perpetual growth and development, its wealth of branches and foliage, its blossoming and fruit-bearing, it is a noble and striking illustration of the world in the widest sense--the Universe, the Cosmos, while the sap which courses equally through the trunk and through the veins of the smallest leaflet, drawn by an incomprehensible process through invisible roots from the nourishing earth, still more forcibly suggests that mysterious principle, Life, which we _think_ we understand because we see its effects and feel it in ourselves, but the sources of which will never be reached, as the problem of it will never be solved, either by the prying of experimental science or the musings of contemplative speculation; life eternal, also,--for the workings of nature _are_ eternal,--and the tree that is black and lifeless to-day, we know from long experience is not dead, but will revive in the fulness of time, and bud, and grow and bear again. All these things _we_ know are the effects of laws; but the ancients attributed them to living Powers,--the CHTHONIC POWERS (from the Greek word CHTHON, "earth, soil"), which have by some later and dreamy thinkers been called weirdly but not unaptly, "the Mothers," mysteriously at work in the depths of silence and darkness, unseen, unreachable, and inexhaustibly productive. Of these powers again, what more perfect symbol or representative than the Tree, as standing for vegetation, one for all, the part for the whole? It lies so near that, in later times, it was enlarged, so as to embrace the whole universe, in the majestic conception of the Cosmic Tree which has its roots on earth and heaven for its crown, while its fruit are the golden apples--the stars, and Fire,--the red lightning. [Illustration: 66.--EAGLE-HEADED FIGURE BEFORE THE SACRED TREE. (Smith's "Chaldea.")] [Illustration: 67.--FOUR-WINGED HUMAN FIGURE BEFORE THE SACRED TREE. (Perrot and Chipiez.)]