The mystical relationship of man and tree is further illustrated in an old German belief quoted by Mannhardt, that a sick child placed in a hole made in a tree by sawing off a branch, or by splitting it open with a wedge, will recover as soon as the tree-wound heals. Should the child die and the tree survive, the human soul will inhabit the tree for the rest of its life.[185] The family tree and the community tree were merely extensions of this conception. The heroic descendants of Pelops regarded the plane-tree as especially sacred to them and bound up with their fortunes, and in later times we find families taking their names from trees. Mannhardt quotes in this connection the German surnames Linde, Holunder, Kirschbaum, Birnbaum, etc.[186] But more important than the family tree is the community tree. In many an old German village there stood a tree, often a May-tree, which the villagers guarded as the apple of their eye. It was looked upon as the life-tree, the tutelary genius, the second “I” of the whole community. Devotions were paid to it and gifts offered as to a deity.[187] The ancient fig-tree in the Comitium at Rome, already alluded to as a supposed descendant of the very tree under which Romulus and Remus were found, is another case in point.[188] It was held to be closely connected with the fortunes of the city, and Tacitus describes the terror of the Romans when, in the reign of Nero, it suddenly began to flag and wither, and their relief when, upon the Emperor’s death, it was found to have renewed its vigour.[189] Pliny tells of two myrtle-trees, called the Patrician and Plebeian, which grew before the temple of Quirinus at Rome. As sacred to Venus, and hence symbolical of union, these trees were held to represent the amity which existed between the two orders. At first they had grown with equal vigour, but when the patricians began to encroach upon the power of the plebs their tree outgrew the other, which languished beneath its baleful shadow. After the Marsian war, however, from which date the power of the Senate began to decline, it was noticed that the patrician tree showed signs of age, while the plebeian sprouted forth with new vigour.[190] Curiously enough, there is, or was so recently as 1885, an old tree in Jerusalem, opposite Cook’s office, belonging to an old family and protected by the Sultan’s firman, which the Arabs consider will fall when the Sultan’s rule ends. “It lost a large limb during the Turco-Russian war, and is now (1885) in a decayed state.”[191] [Illustration: Fig. 24.—Imperial coin of Myra in Lycia, showing tree-goddess.(Goblet d’Alviella.)]