The head of this family was named Poer, and the members of it are shown seated in two rows on thorns, one below the other; each is receiving from the Tree of Life, or rather from the divine influence residing in the tree, and personified as a vivifying agent under the figure of the goddess Nupte or Nepte, a stream of the life-giving water, and at the same time an offering of its fruit. The tree is the _ficus-sycamorous_, the sycamore tree of the Bible, and it stands on a sort of aquarium, symbolical of the sacred Nile, the life-supporting agent in the land of Egypt. The tree is abundantly productive, and from the upper part of it, among the branches, the goddess Nepte rises with a tray of fruit in one hand, and with the other pours from a vase streams of its life-giving water. Mr. Barlow further says--"In the 'Tree of Life' of the Egyptians, we have perhaps the earliest, certainly the most complete and consistent representation of this most ancient and seemingly universal symbol, the Tree of Life, in the midst of paradise, furnishing the divine support of immortality."[4] Forlong says--"In his little work on Symbolism, under the head '_Sacred Trees_,' Mr. Barlow has expressed what I have long felt. He says, 'the most _generally received symbol of life_ is a tree, as also the most appropriate.... There might be an innate appreciation of the beautiful and the grand in this impression, conjoined with the conception of a more sublime truth, and _the first principles of a natural theology_, but in most instances it would appear rather to have been the result of an ancient and primitive _symbolical_ worship, at one time _universally prevalent_.'" (The italics are Forlong's.) As men came to recognise in themselves two natures--the physical and spiritual, the life of the body and the life of the soul--"So these came to be represented either by two trees, as sometimes found, or in reference to universal life, by one tree only." Some thousands of years before even the age _imputed_ to Genesis, there were sculptured on the Zodiac of Dendera, Egypt, two sacred trees, the Western and Eastern; the first was _truth_ and _religion_--the sacred palm surmounted by the ostrich feather--the latter, the _vital or generative force of nature_, beyond which Egypt thought she had risen, therein surpassing her Eastern parent; at least so I feel inclined to class them chronologically. "Besides the monumental evidence furnished," says Barlow, "of a sacred tree, a Tree of Life, there is an historical and traditional evidence of the same thing found in the early literature of various nations, in their customs and usages." All grand, extraordinary, beautiful, or highly useful trees, have in every land at some time been associated with the noble, wonderful, lovely and beneficial ideas which man has attributed to his God or to nature. We can recognise the early worship of trees in the reverence of thought which attaches to the two in