In the mythologies of more northern peoples the place of the palm is supplied by the more stately, if less upright, oak. The patriarch Jacob hid the idols of his household under the oak near Shechem,[31] and his descendants afterwards made burnt offerings under every thick oak.[32] Among the Greeks and Romans this tree was sacred to Zeus, or Jupiter, the Father of Gods and men. With the Russians, the Prussians, and the Germans, the oak was equally sacred. The sacred oak was the form under which the Druids worshipped the Supreme Being _Hæsus_, or Mighty. According to Davies,[33] it was symbolised by the letter D, which forms the consonantal sound of the word denoting God in many languages, as it does of the name of the mythical father _Ad_, of the Adamic stock of mankind. In Teutonic mythology the great oak forms the roof-tree of the Volsung’s hall, spreading its branches far and wide in the upper air, being the counterpart, says Mr. Cox, of the mighty Yggdrasil.[34] This is the gigantic ash-tree, whose branches embrace the whole world, and which is thought to be only another form of the colossal Irminsul. Mr. Cox observes on this: “The tree and pillar are thus alike seen in the columns, whether of Herakles or of Roland; while the cosmogonic character of the myth is manifest in the legend of the primeval Askr, the offspring of the ash-tree, of which Virgil, from the characteristic which probably led to its selection, speaks as stretching its roots as far down into earth as its branches soar towards heaven.”[35] The name of the Teutonic Askr is also that of the Iranian _Meschia_,[36] and the ash, therefore, must be identified with the tree from which springs the primeval man of the Zarathustrian cosmogony.[37] So Sigmund of the Volsung Tale is drawn from the trunk of a poplar tree,[38] which thus occupies the same position as the ash and the oak as a “tree of life.” The poplar was, indeed, a sacred tree among many nations of antiquity. This may, doubtless, be explained by reference to its “habit,” which much resembles that of the sacred Indian fig-tree, with which the trembling movement, as well as the shape, of its leaves have caused it to be thus compared.