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Better a living monument, which you enjoy, than a posthumous headstone. Twelve years is a ripe age for a dog or cat, eighteen for a cow, twenty-five for a horse, thirty for a mule, sixty for an elephant. Modern medicine has extended man's life expectancy to about seventy-five years. Certain parrots, tamed wild geese, and snapping turtles are said to have lived 150 years and more. In comparison to such brief life spans, many trees are "immortal." It took Donna in September 1960—one of the worse hurricanes in recorded U.S. weather history—finally to lay low the Thorndale Oak, a red giant at Millbrook, N.Y., measuring 24 feet 9 inches in girth, whose age was gauged at 353 years. The acorn whence this tree grew apparently sprouted some seasons before the Dutch first sailed up the nearby Hudson River in 1610. |
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