Suetonius again tells us how the tumulus of the divine Augustus was carefully planted; and the manner in which he notes the fact seems to me to argue that some special importance was attached to the ceremony. The acacia is one of the most sacred trees of Egypt; and Egyptian monuments, with their usual frankness, show us a sarcophagus {142}from which an acacia emerges, with the naïve motto, “Osiris springs forth.”, An incident which occurred during the recent Sino-Japanese war shows how easily points of this sort may be overlooked by hasty writers in formal descriptions. One of the London illustrated papers printed an account of the burial of the Japanese dead at Port Arthur, and after mentioning the simple headstone erected at each grave volunteered the further statement that nothing else marked the place of interment. But the engraving which accompanied it, taken from a photograph, showed on the contrary that a little tree had also been planted on each tiny tumulus. I learn from Mr. William Simpson that the Tombs of the Kings near Pekin are conspicuous from afar by their lofty groves of pine trees. Evergreens, I believe, are specially planted upon graves or tumuli because they retain their greenness throughout the entire winter, and thus as it were give continuous evidence of the vitality and activity of the indwelling spirit. Mr. Frazer has shown in _The Golden Bough_ that mistletoe similarly owes its special sanctity to the fact that it visibly holds the soul of the tree uninjured in itself, while all the surrounding branches stand bare and lifeless. Accordingly, tumuli are very frequently crowned by evergreens. Almost all the round barrows in southern England, for example, are topped by very ancient Scotch firs; and as the Scotch fir is not an indigenous tree south of the Tweed, it is practically certain that these old pines are the descendants of ancestors put in by human hands when the barrows were first raised over the cremated and buried bodies of prehistoric chieftains. In short, the Scotch fir is in England the sacred tree of the barrows. As a rule, however, in Northern Europe, the yew is the species specially planted in graveyards, and several such yews in various parts of England and Germany are held to possess a peculiar sanctity. The great clump of very ancient yews in {143}Norbury Park near Dorking, known as the Druids’ Grove, has long been considered a holy wood of remote antiquity. In southern Europe, the cypress replaces the yew as the evergreen most closely connected with tombs and cemeteries. In Provence and Italy, however, the evergreen holme-oak is almost equally a conventional denizen of places of interment. M. Lajard in his able essay _Sur le Culte du Cypres_ has brought together much evidence of this worship of evergreens, among the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and American nations.