In the present chapter we propose to give a few of the legends with which groves were enriched when the worship of the sun (Baal) was the religion of the world--legends yet remembered in Aran. In the groves they offered sacrifices, and "burnt," writes the Prophet Hosea, "incense under the oak and the poplar and the turpentine tree [the pine], because the shadow thereof was good."[20] And we are told that "Abraham planted a grove in Bersabee, and there called upon the Name of the everlasting God."[21] [Sidenote: WORSHIP OF BAAL IN ARAN.] The selection of such places originated, no doubt, in the fact that the gloom of the forest was calculated to excite awe, and because they considered that the spirits of the departed hovered over the places where the bodies were buried; and it was common to bury the dead under trees, as appears from the eighth verse of the thirty-fifth chapter of the Book of Genesis, where it is stated that when Deborah, the nurse of Rebecca, died, she was buried at the foot of Bethel under an oak tree, and the name of that place was called "The Oak of Weeping;" and when Saul, the first King of Israel, fell at the battle of Gilboe, his bones were buried under an oak tree at Jabesh.[22] Amongst the Hebrews it was common, before the time of Moses, to plant groves. But the idolatrous nations planted them also; and groves and the places of idol-worship soon became convertible terms. For the purpose, therefore, of extirpating idolatry, the Lord thus spoke through Moses: "Thou shalt plant no grove, nor any tree near the altar of the Lord thy God."[23] And in after-centuries, when Josias abolished the worship of Baal in Judah, and destroyed them that offered incense to the sun, and the moon, and to the twelve signs, he caused the grove to be burnt there.[24] Whether the groves of Aran were destroyed at the time of the destruction of the religion of Baal and of the introduction of Christianity, or in after-ages, it is impossible now to state. That great trees had existence in the islands in 1618 is certain, as appears by a partly hereinbefore recited indenture of that date, when Henry Lynch did demise a moiety of the three islands to William Anderson, his executors, etc., for a long term of years, excepting thereout _great trees_. [Sidenote: NYMPHS OF TREES.] _The Oak._--The chief object of worship was the oak, which has not inaptly been called "the king of the forest." With its life was bound up the life of a nymph, for the nymphs of trees, called in classics _Hamadryades_, were believed to die together with the trees which had been their abode, and with which they had come into existence. Those that presided over woods in general were called _Dryades_, as the divinities of particular trees were Hamadryades. Not unfrequently has the axe of the woodman been stayed by the voice of the nymph breaking from the groaning oak. [Sidenote: THE OAK.]